


Wings

by astolat



Series: Captain America works [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Body Modification, Hydra (Marvel), M/M, OT4 Feels, Origin Story, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-01-23 23:40:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1583678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You know, whatever you’re planning to do to me,” Sam said, working hard to keep his voice steady, “I'm not going to be using it for you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Wings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7404004) by [xyoshiki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xyoshiki/pseuds/xyoshiki)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Cesperanza and lim for beta! ♥

“You know, whatever you’re planning to do to me,” Sam said, working hard to keep his voice steady, “I'm not going to be using it for you."

He didn’t know where he was, other than someplace he didn’t want to be. All he could see was the floor underneath him, square white tiles like a bathroom. They'd strapped his head securely into a face rest, his arms out to the sides and his legs shoulder-width apart on a big metal operating table. No give in any of the straps — he couldn't move so much as a centimeter in any direction. No reason to strap anyone down like this for torture, so that meant something worse was on the agenda.

He couldn’t help the scared-kid thought running around a wheel inside his head: _why_ , _why me_ , because it was halfway a real question. None of this made sense. Hydra had made an _effort_ on this one, burned one of their deep sleeper agents. Steve had a short list of people he trusted enough to vouch for former SHIELD agents right now — Natasha, Hill, Fury, Clint. He wouldn’t take intel from anyone unless two of those people signed off, and none of them were feeling all that trusting these days. There couldn’t be that many agents left in Hydra’s pocket who could clear that bar.

But even so, Hydra had traded Gladell’s cover just to sucker him and Steve into that ambush. Sam could’ve understood if they’d been trying to take Steve out, but they hadn’t had enough firepower for that. As far as Sam could tell, their actual objective had been to pin Steve down, and then bag _him_ , and that — well, that was enough to freak him the fuck out if he thought about it too hard.

“No offense, and I’ll admit you’ve got a pretty badass logo,” Sam said, because talking beat hyperventilating, “but I'm not really Hydra material.”

He was just talking to make words, drown out the steel clatter of medical instruments, but the door slid open while he was talking, two pairs of footsteps walking in, and when he finished a sharp voice said, “Indeed he is not, Doctor Kardan. A point worthy of more consideration. I remain uncomfortable with the — order of operations.”

“Hey, me too,” Sam put in. “Maybe you all should go talk it over.”

“You have reopened this discussion four times now, Major,” the doctor answered; weird voice, dreamy, like she was talking about something far off. “That must be sufficient.” She came closer and patted Sam’s shoulder with a thin clammy hand. Sam would have flinched, if he’d been able to. “Do not concern yourself, Samuel. While your — metamorphosis will require the exercise of your independent will, I assure you that your future service to Hydra will not. And we have made significant improvements to the process of its eradication.”

Funny how much that didn’t make Sam feel better. The doctor was walking around the table now: shiny flat black shoes going _click click click_ on the shiny tile floor, the sound of water running in a sink while she washed her hands. “We had quite given up, you know—we thought the wing program was a failure. All the prototype operators had failed one trial or another — we wrote you yourself off after you left the program. But then Captain Rogers recruits you, and behold! In crisis, you outperform all our required metrics. I must say it truly seems to me the hand of Providence moving.”

“Yeah?” Sam said. “How exactly do you square that with us blowing the hell out of your helicarriers?” He flinched hard: someone else was wiping something cold and wet over his back, up and down his spine and across the shoulderblades.

“Ah, well,” the doctor said, coming back to the table, “not all of us thought Insight the wisest program. So wasteful! Slaughtering twenty million people because they were dangerous to Hydra? But the danger of today may be the weapon of tomorrow. As you yourself will demonstrate.”

“Is there any reason for further delay?” the other voice broke in, impatient.

“None at all,” the doctor said. “Nurse, let us begin with the L5 lumbar nerves.” The needles started going in.

Sam lost control of his body little by little. Feet below the knee went first, then the rest of the legs, then everything below the waist, the neck down, and then they were feeding a tube into his mouth and a machine was breathing for him, and he couldn’t do anything but blink. He could still feel everything, all the impersonal hands on his body, like the input was coming in fine and it was just output that wasn’t working.

 _Any time now, man_ , Sam thought in Steve's direction. _Any time at all._ He knew that wasn't fair, knew it wasn't going to happen. He let himself imagine it anyway, trying to hold off the panic gnawing at his gut: doors busting open, Hydra goons splattered around the room, Steve's hands ripping the restraints off. His breath hissed Vader-style in and out of his lungs, regular and even.

“How is the subject doing?” That was Doctor Kardan again.

“All vital signs acceptable, doctor,” another voice said. “Pulse elevated but within expected tolerances.”

“Very well,” Kardan said. There was a small click, and a blue light started shining overhead, bright enough to stain the tiles, tint the whole world. “Then let us begin.”

That was when it started to hurt.

#

Sam didn’t exactly wake up, because he hadn’t been asleep for any of it. But at some point the pain eased back enough that he was a human being again, not just a bunch of nerve cells shrieking. They were taking the needles out, drops of blood spattering on the floor. Kardan’s shoes came around into Sam’s view. They weren’t shiny anymore, blood streaked across the leather. “Congratulations, Samuel,” she said. “You have survived. Do not try to move yet, however. You have emerged from the cocoon, but your wings will still need some time to unfold.”

More of the needles were sliding out now, and Sam was starting to get his body back. Except it didn’t feel like his body anymore. Everything gone all wrong. His arms and legs were sore like he’d been working out for five hours straight, but at the same time they felt lighter than air, like they would’ve floated right off the table except for the restraints. His back was hard and tight as if someone had wrapped steel bands around him a couple inches too small to fit. Steel bands holding something in. Something his brain couldn’t make sense out of, but that was part of him, something they’d put _inside_ him—

“Jesus,” Sam whispered, sick. He tried to jerk against the restraints again, involuntarily, desperate to reach around and touch and find out—

Pain fired all along his back, the _thing_ inside him trying to move, too, like another arm reaching back. “Jesus!” Sam said, his voice rising, _what did they put in me—_

“Perhaps some sedative,” Doctor Kardan was saying thoughtfully. “A little midozolam, nurse, if you please—” The world went soft and fuzzy and faded out into static.

#

Sam had been on midozolam before. He hadn’t been hurt himself, watching Riley go down: he’d landed without so much as a scrape. The doctors had cleared him, he’d been in the air two days later. But he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing it again, the pillar of smoke and fire trailing down to the earth. After a week without sleep, he’d started hallucinating, and it had gone downhill from there for a while. They’d had to go through a bunch of stuff, trying to get him to sleep. Even after he’d called it quits and gone home, it had been a long, hard year before he’d been able to get off the drugs.

So the dose Hydra gave him wore off pretty quick. When it did, he was still on the table, but the room was quiet and empty, most of the lights turned off. The pain in his back had subsided, though he ached all over. He lay still this time and did 7-11 breathing until his head cleared up and his chest stopped heaving. Whatever they’d done to him, whatever they’d stuck inside him, there’d be a way to get it out, or turn it off; there’d be something, he told himself. They hadn’t fucked with his brain yet, anyway. Sam worked very hard not to think about the chair he and Steve had found down in the bowels of that Hydra base, the place where they’d kept the Winter Soldier. He was real sorry right now he’d ever watched the videotapes from that place.

He tried to wiggle his fingers around towards the wrist restraint. They didn’t work right, fingers bumping up against each other, but after three tries he managed to get two fingertips around the snap buckle and squeeze them enough to pop it loose. He got the forearm straps and the elbows, too. Then his arms were loose and he was in business, except the next place to go was the straps across his back, and Sam didn’t really want to put his hands anywhere around there.

First he popped the straps holding down his neck and around his waist. It took a while, his arms shaky and strange. He hit himself in the head a couple of times, painfully jarring. Then there was no more putting it off. He reached up towards the small of his back, slow and careful, walking his fingers around his sides. His shoulders let him know they were not happy, but they’d cut him some slack under the circumstances, and then his fingers brushed against something weirdly smooth. A shock ran up his whole spine straight to the skull, because he could feel it from the other side, too: he felt his fingers touching his— touching his—

They were pushing against the straps now, and Sam bit down on a strap end between his teeth, pressing his forehead hard against the headrest and keeping in the scream that wanted to rip out of his throat. The straps were snapping one after another, plastic buckles flying in pieces scattered over the floor. Soon as they were all loose, his body started to curl up fetal, nothing he could do about it: pulling him in tight towards his strapped-down legs. The thigh straps were busting open too. He was crouched in on himself, kneeling atop the operating table, and the shadow was spreading out over the floor. The shadow of opened wings.

“Well, _shit_ ,” Sam said, trying to make it sound pissed off, fed up, but his voice cracked coming out, and he pressed his head down against the table.

He let himself have ten breaths, and then he popped open the last straps on his legs and climbed down from the table. He landed off-balance, staggering across the room. The edge of one half-spread wing hit the wall, and his back exploded with pain. The wings jerked back in — _he_ jerked the wings back in — and that hurt like fuck too, sent him reeling the other way. He grabbed hold of the table and held on shivering until the pain let up again.

He kept the wings close against his body and moved towards the door, cautious as a man on a ledge, trying to figure out how his body worked now. There was a weird bounce to his step, like his legs had been switched up for pogo sticks. They held him up, though, and they got him to the door. Sam put both hands flat on the surface and leaned against it to catch his breath. There was going to be at least one guard out there, and a long way to the exit. His best bet was going to be getting some directions from whoever was out there. Assuming they didn’t give him one good swat and knock him over like a bunch of tinkertoys.

“Not going to get any easier if you wait for them all to come back,” Sam murmured to himself, and then he gripped the door handle and shoved it open.

There were two guards. They turned, slow, and Sam punched the first one in the throat, hard as he could. His feet tried to rise up from the ground onto tip-toe with the movement, but the trachea split open against his knuckles. The guy dropped like a rock, choking up blood. Sam and the other guy both stared down at him a moment, and then Sam jolted back into action, grabbed the other man’s arm with both his hands and swung him — _bad fucking idea,_ his back howled. Sam screamed more than the guard did as the man came flying off his feet and into the wall head-first, wet melon-crack of his skull against the concrete.

Sam dropped him and collapsed to his knees in the hallway, muscles of his belly knotted around every breath. “What the _fuck_ , what the actual _fuck_ ,” Sam said out loud, making noise instead of just sobbing.

He scrabbled one of the machine guns back towards him. He took hold of the strap in both hands and snapped it — on purpose this time, watching himself. His hands hurt, doing it — his skin and his flesh ached. But underneath that, the bones — they’d done something to his bones. What would you build a man out of, if you wanted him to fly? Fuck. Sam pressed his forehead against the concrete wall in front of him. He had to get moving. More of them were going to show up anytime now. There had to have been an alarm on the door. His hands curled around the gun like it was a teddy bear, shaking so bad he couldn’t have pulled the trigger. He couldn’t get himself going.

There was a clang somewhere down the hallway, around a corner out of sight—a door sliding open, and footsteps coming. Just one set. Sam kept breathing, told himself he’d get up before the man came around the corner. Right when he came around the corner. But the footsteps were running fast now, pounding on the floor, heavy, a big guy. Sam closed his eyes as he recognized them, so glad he didn’t have to move, as Steve came skidding to the floor right next to him.

“Sam,” Steve said, his voice raw and hoarse, smoke-rough. He reached out but didn’t touch, hands hesitating, wavering. There was a stink of gasoline fumes and gunpowder coming off him. It was the most beautiful thing Sam had ever smelled. Steve finally figured out how to get his hands on Sam’s sides: under his armpits, out of the way of the wings, ready to help him up. “Sam. Can you stand?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, not moving. “Sure, anytime.”

“How about now?” Steve said.

“Maybe later,” Sam said.

“The thing is, I’m pretty sure this building’s about to fall down,” Steve said. “So—” He was already gently, inexorably easing Sam up, easier than he should’ve been able to, like Sam weighed nothing in his hands.

“Yeah, okay,” Sam said. He let Steve duck under his arm. There was smoke filtering into the hallway, getting thicker as they moved farther along it. But Steve was warm and solid all along his side, arm wrapped around his waist, so good. “Listen, though, let’s get something clear right now.”

“What?” Steve said.

“Not one angel joke,” Sam said. “I’m serious, I will drop your ass off a bridge.”

“Okay,” Steve said.

“No pigeon jokes, either,” Sam said.

“Whatever you say,” Steve said.

#

Steve showed up in the hospital room that night with a giant get-well-soon basket made up like a nest, full of chocolate eggs he had to have dug up from some Walgreens discount Easter shelf. “Fuck you, Rogers, you bring me stale-ass chocolate,” Sam said, lifting his head off the pillow to glare up at him.

“I just thought it might make you feel more at home,” Steve said, wide-eyed innocence. He put the basket down by the bedside and took one of the eggs.

“Oh, and now you’re stealing my stale chocolate,” Sam said. He propped himself up on an elbow and reached out to get another egg for himself: slow and careful, watching his fingers moving through the air and curling around it. He’d already clocked one of the doctors by accident, before he’d quit trying to shake hands. “Listen, man, can you get me a straight answer? I’ve had twenty-six people in and out of here already, and none of them felt like it was necessary to share anything with me. All they’ll say is I should lie on my stomach and try not to move.”

Steve didn’t answer right away, head bent down over the chocolate egg, as though turquoise aluminum foil covered with bunnies posed a serious challenge for Captain America, and Sam got it: they’d sent him in here to deliver the bad news.

“They tried to do a bone scan,” Steve said. “Problem is—”

“I haven’t got any left?” Sam said.

Turned out Hydra had swapped most of his bones for carbon fiber and titanium. How, nobody really had a clue, and they had even fewer ideas how to switch them back. As for the wings—

“The doctors can’t take them out,” Steve said. “The operation hooked them directly into your spinal cord. They said they can clip them off—”

“Like hell they can,” Sam said, sharp. His gut had clenched up instinctively, as hard as if somebody had suggested cutting off his arm; on his back the wings were curling tighter against his body. He took a deep breath, tried to make it sound normal, sound easy. “No way, man, I can _feel_ these things. Besides, I might as well get something for my trouble. The wings stay.” There wasn’t any sense making it hard. There weren’t any better options.

Steve nodded, going along with him. But neither of them talked a lot, after that. He reached out silently and took the egg Sam still hadn’t managed to unwrap, and opened it up for him. They ate all the rest of the chocolate together, one foil-wrapped egg at a time.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Yeah, I got that,” Sam said. “One thing at a time. A man’s got to walk before he can fly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to cesperanza and lim and giddygeek for beta! Also to Taranea & Kamster for asking for more detail on the wings, which prompted a bunch of stuff in this part. :D

At least they let him out of bed once they’d decided they couldn’t fix him. Sam wasn’t in pain anymore. His body was healing up around the wings about five times as fast as it should have.

The doctors wanted him down in the PT center for mirror-therapy, the kind of stuff they used on vets with phantom limb problems, but just getting to the elevators was a problem. Sam couldn’t do much more than hang on to Steve’s arm, letting him drive while he concentrated on trying not to slam into the walls. He had to think about every step, and sometimes no matter how much he’d thought, it still didn’t go according to plan. His body didn’t make __sense__ : he’d lost about sixty pounds off his body weight, which couldn't have just been bone, but he could punch through walls almost without trying.

Maybe twelve yards down the hall, he took a step that pushed him off the ground. The wings spread out and he kept going straight for the ceiling. Steve yelped and hauled him back. The wings beat backwards just once, startled, and Sam drove straight down into him. They smashed flat to the floor, tiles cracking underneath them. Sam had to be glad it was Steve he’d flattened, because it felt like any other guy would’ve been cracked in half, too. Even Steve was wincing as they climbed up to try again. By the time they made it to the elevators, it was an hour later, and the PT center was closing for the night. They had to turn around and go back.

He woke up screaming that night, the screams he hadn’t been able to get out while they’d been doing it, working on him. __“The bone saw, please,”__ in Kardan’s dreamy voice, and a whine like the worst thing out of a dentist’s office. He was fighting the straps, fighting them hard, but there weren’t any straps; Steve was on his back, between the wings, his arms laced underneath them to grip the bed on either side, holding Sam down with his own body. “Sam,” he was saying. “Sam, wake up.” Half the equipment around the bed was knocked over and there were beeping alarms going off. A nurse was at the IV with a syringe, looking anxious.

“Okay,” Sam said, panting. “Okay.” He was shaking all over, the wings raised and trembling, but the sedative was hitting. Steve climbed off and sat heavily back down in the chair next to the bed. There was a little blood dripping from his nose; he pinched it away with a couple of fingers. He kept a hand on Sam’s shoulder the rest of the night.

The next morning they made it to the PT center, and the therapist took Sam to the longest mirrored wall they had, maybe twenty feet, a ballet barre stretched the whole length. “All right,” the therapist said: a big guy with Marine tattoos snaking down his forearms who kept having to stop himself looking sidelong at Steve — or more to the point, at Captain America. “Can you open them up?”

Sam stared at himself in the mirror. The wings folded in tight to his back, pretty much just like his old wingpack. Looking straight on, he couldn’t see them; it was just him, no different. There were a few scrapes here and there from the straps, a stitched-up slice along the cheekbone that looked a week old; that was about it. Everything else, you couldn’t see. His balance was changed, though, weight of the wings on his shoulders and across his back.

He took a deep breath and tried to work them. On purpose was harder than by instinct, but after a few false starts, he found his way back to the muscle-move he’d used to open the old wings, a clench in the shoulders and tightening up his abs. They folded out, smooth and fast, going and going, and the man in the mirror wasn’t him anymore; he was an Internet joke somebody had put together with Photoshop, just good enough to make you stare, uneasy, and wonder if maybe they were real.

Except they were real. Opened up, they felt almost weightless. His whole body wanted to come up on the balls of his feet; he had to make an effort to keep flat on the floor. The wings weren’t stretched all the way out, not by a long shot, but they wanted to be, moving in and out restlessly, butting up against the walls to either side, dark silvery grey surface ruffling, individual feathers moving. There were — hundreds of those, it looked like; maybe thousands. Along the top edges they were tiny, almost like scales, lapped and hard and shiny, growing out to dozens of long bladed ones at the bottom edge: a bird made of steel and carbon fiber.

There were two short, narrow pitot tubes mounted on the undersides, at the leading edge. Sam wondered how he was supposed to use those: on the old wings, they’d used a micro earpiece that beeped faster or slower to let you know the airspeed. Sounded simple, but half the guys in his training unit had washed out because they couldn’t process that info in the air. That had to have been one of Hydra’s goddamn __criteria__ , but he didn’t see any way to hook up to — “Jesus, did they put anything in my __head?__ ” he asked suddenly, reaching up to grope around his face and his ears. He missed, hands hitting himself in the face, and wincing away automatically, still trying to touch at the same time, getting into a vicious circle.

Steve jumped forward and grabbed his wrists until Sam could get them back under control. “No,” he said. “Not that they can tell.”

Sam pulled it together, deep breathing, steadied himself. Whatever they’d done, it was still him on the inside. He looked at himself in the mirror again, wings and all; looked at Steve’s hands on his wrists, putting it together with the warm pressure of his grip. He could feel the faint breeze the wings were stirring up on his skin. When he watched the wings bumping the walls, he could feel that, too, somehow; and the longer he watched, the more he started to just feel  _them_  — the way he could feel his arms and legs, parts of him; like the whole outline of his body was changing shape, everything he understood about himself—

“Okay, so now—” the therapist began, reaching out his hands towards the wings.

Sam jerked back, and the wings slid themselves back in as fast as they’d come out. “Whoa, man, no way,” Sam said. “No wing touching.” His heart was pounding weird and fast, even though the guy hadn’t even touched him.

The therapist paused. “You need as much biofeedback as possible to integrate — ”

“Yeah, I got that,” Sam said. “One thing at a time. A man’s got to walk before he can fly.”

#

He spent three days in front of mirrors, touching his fingers to his nose, then his elbow, then back, then touching his ear, then his nose again, learning where all the parts of his body were from scratch. It was like being a toddler all over again, except this time around he didn’t have the kind of brain that thought it was awesome to sing __Twinkle Twinkle Little Star__ for an hour straight without stopping.

The PT kept going after him to touch the wings more; he even made another reach for them a couple of times. “Look, I know it’s your job to push,” Sam said finally, deliberately level; he was getting mad. “But I’ve been telling you loud and clear, I’m not ready. You need to start listening to that.”

The therapist hesitated, but then he said, “You really need direct contact. Otherwise it’s not going to—”

“Okay, we’re done,” Sam said, cutting him off. He folded the wings back in. He got his towel off the barre and wiped down his arms and face at the same time as he walked out of the room, slow and careful. Everything worked together; he didn’t hit the doorframe. Steve fell in beside him, an unobtrusive hand ready, but Sam didn’t need to grab onto him.

“All right, man, I’m getting out of here,” Sam said. “Come on and help spring me.”

“You sure about that?” Steve said.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I might as well knock holes into my own walls for a change. There’s a rehab center ten minutes from my place, I know some of the guys that work there.”

A couple of the doctors tried to put up a fuss, but finally they gave him a stack of paperwork to sign, a goody bag full of prescriptions, and Steve took him home. The house was locked up, mail piled up all over the mat. Sam hadn’t been back in — three months? Not since they’d headed out on their wild goose chase after Barnes; or more like their ghost chase, for all they’d found.

Walking inside felt like stepping into a stranger’s house. Sam walked carefully down the hallway, fingers resting on the walls on either side. He got out into the back yard and pulled the XXXL t-shirt off over his head, and then he let the wings spread out, sun behind him hitting them full force, throwing the wide shadow on the ground in front of him. Even in his thirty-foot yard, they still hit the walls and had to stop, but they felt good anyway, each feather soaking up the sun—for real; they had some solar panel tech on the surface.

He turned around. Steve was standing in the back doorway watching, arms folded over his chest. He was trying not to let the worry show, but his whole face gave it away: mouth sad, eyes looking away and back, the slump of his shoulders. Sam rubbed his hands over his face. Steve had a full dance card already, and this wasn’t on it. There were problems only Captain America could solve, but this wasn’t one of them. And any trail Bucky had left to find was only getting colder.

“Thanks, man. I’m all right,” Sam said. “You don’t have to stick around.”

Except Steve just shrugged a shoulder. “Actually, I do. I gave up my lease.”

Sam felt his eyes go a little tight and hot at the corners with relief he wished he could honestly not feel. “Oh, so now I’ve got a roommate?” he said, folding his arms.

“Until you kick me out,” Steve said.

“You’re buying the groceries,” Sam said. “I’ve seen how you eat.”

“Fair enough,” Steve said.

Sam woke up in mid-air that night, his throat raw and Steve sprawled over his back just trying to hang on. The wings were wide open, moving. He folded them in, and he and Steve thumped back down to the bed together, hard. Two of the legs smashed, and they rolled down the skewed side and landed on the floor. “ _Shit_ ,” Sam said, gritting his teeth against the wave of pain.

“Goddammit,” Steve said, low and angry, first time Sam had ever heard him swear, and he was up and lifting Sam bodily off the ground. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Sam said, through his clenched jaw. He knew he was holding on too tight, his hand digging into Steve’s shoulder.

Steve didn’t flinch, just maneuvered him out into the living room and got him back on his feet. “You want the guest room bed?”

“Nah,” Sam said, limping over to the couch. “I don’t need to work through all my furniture.” He tossed a throw pillow on the carpet and slowly levered himself down again.

“Okay,” Steve said. He got another of the throw pillows and dropped down next to him.

“You don’t need to,” Sam said quietly.

Steve shrugged, already closing his eyes. “Saves wear and tear.”

#

Things started to settle into some kind of ordinary shape. The press hadn’t got hold of the story yet, and Sam’s neighbors didn’t do a lot of peeking over the fence. Sam wore big t-shirts when he went to the rehab center every morning; his buddy Mike got him in and gave him private sessions in a mirror room with blinds on the windows. He spent the rest of the day mostly walking around his back yard in slow circles, occasionally lifting off and slamming into the fence or a tree. Steve sat on the back stoop and read to him out of whatever book he was catching up with that day.

Sam had loved his old wings from the moment he’d first put them on. Flying on his own, no cockpit shell around him, no hang-glider or parafoil, he’d finally understood what could make you go climbing up to the sun, even if you knew it might kill you. He’d wanted to eat, sleep, and fuck in them; he’d always been sorry to take them off. And the new ones—well, Kardan hadn’t been lying, when she’d called the old ones a __prototype__ , the crappy first draft. These wings were better. He could tell that much, even though he was still working out how to use them. They were thinner and lighter and stronger all at the same time; like whatever they’d swapped in for his bones. __He__ was better, for some value of better: the way Captain America was better than an asthmatic kid who couldn’t run two blocks. It seemed almost stupid to complain that he couldn’t take them off, anymore.

But every night, lying in the dark on his living room floor, trying to get comfortable on his stomach with the folded wings a solid weight pressing down on his lungs and Steve’s arm slung over his waist to keep him from taking off again, he got mad: a knot of stoked-up anger in his belly that built each time he woke up hot, each time he jerked awake gasping. The anger had a sour, familiar old taste, bitter like smoke; he remembered it from his last few missions, looking down at the ground, trying to guess where the RPG might have been fired from, knowing it wouldn’t do any good to know.

He got mad at Steve: for coming too late, for pulling him back in. It beat getting mad at Hydra, because Hydra wasn’t here to take anything out on; and it beat getting mad at himself for the same things: getting caught, getting back in the game.

Steve didn’t say anything when Sam snapped at him in the mornings, just kept his head down and made the coffee and waited for caffeine and daylight to kick in. It took Sam two solid weeks and his first decent night’s sleep before he noticed Steve wasn’t just putting up with him. Steve was in a knot of his own. For a moment it pissed Sam off; he almost said, __what the hell, drama queen__ _,_ and then he stopped and put down the coffee cup, because Steve would borrow trouble like he needed it to eat, but that wasn’t what was going on.

“Okay,” he said. “As much fun as it’s been biting your head off a couple times a day, we both know it wasn’t really your fault, so you want to tell me what’s going on that I don’t know about?”

Steve paused, busy over the kitchen sink, and then he said, “I don’t know if you want me to do that.”

“Do it anyway,” Sam said.

Steve turned around and threw the dishtowel across the room into the washing machine, a short vicious lob with enough violence behind it to make the wet towel ring against the metal. “I didn’t know where they’d taken you, so I asked Fury to help me find you,” he said. “And I think his people found out sooner than he told me.”

“You mean he let it happen,” Sam said after a moment, level and cold.

“I think he let the first part happen,” Steve said. “The part that gave him another supersoldier and the latest Hydra tech.”

Sam steadied himself, kept his head up over the first quick swell of rage. “What makes you say so?”

“The timing, mostly. The way his team came in. They showed up with the coordinates and a helicopter and said I had to go with them, right then. That’s what felt wrong. They had a medical team along with them, and one of them was a spinal surgeon. Like they knew what we’d find when we got to you.” Steve shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I haven’t been able to get in touch with Natasha.”

Sam turned and went out into the yard. He could walk now; he could even run again. He could pour himself a cup of coffee without spilling. Pretty soon maybe he’d be able to do more. He sat down on the back stoop, hands clenched around each other. The wings spread out in the sun, instinctive. They felt good, like lying out on the beach, some fucked-up feedback loop. He didn’t have any problem believing Steve’s suspicions. Didn’t even really matter whether it was true or not. It was the kind of thing SHIELD would’ve done, the kind of thing Hydra would’ve done, two sides of the same coin.

And it didn’t matter whether it was true or not, because he didn’t get to handle this any different, either way. He’d known what he was doing when he’d strapped on the wings and jumped into the sky behind Captain America. That shield had a bullseye on it for a reason.

That didn’t mean Sam couldn’t get so pissed off his skull exploded. “God __fucking__ dammit!” he yelled to his backyard. He pressed his palms to his forehead.

After about ten minutes, Steve came out, carrying two beers. The wing on the left folded in automatically to let him get by. He handed Sam a bottle and sat down next to him. “You okay?”

“I don’t know, man,” Sam said. He wrenched the cap off with his bare hand and took a swig. “I’m thinking maybe I’ll turn supervillain and take my revenge out on the world. What do you think of __Razorwing__ as a code name?”

Steve wobbled a hand back and forth. “It’s a little weak.”

“Damn, there goes that plan,” Sam said.

Steve smiled a little next to him. They finished their beer in silence, sat there until the sun climbed up over the back fence and came into their eyes, made them squint. Steve clapped Sam’s shoulder and stood up. “Okay. Pack a bag, soldier. We’re getting out of here.”

“Oh, are we?” Sam gave him a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Time to fly.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Remind me again why we’re doing this here?” Sam said. Weeds were poking up all over the concrete of the abandoned army base around them, through the heaped rubble of the destroyed bunker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With many thanks to cesperanza and lim and giddygeek and therienne! ♥

After twelve faceplants straight into the dirt, Sam called it quits for a while and collapsed back against the wall of the barracks. Steve sat down next to him and handed him another water bottle.

“Remind me again why we’re doing this here?” Sam said. Weeds were poking up all over the concrete of the abandoned army base around them, through the heaped rubble of the destroyed bunker.

“Would you rather be in Central Park?” Steve said. “You’d get a lot of hits on Youtube.”

Sam looked over at him, eyebrow raised.

“I like Youtube!” Steve said.

“Yeah, gold star for adjusting, you keep on at it, old man,” Sam said, patting his leg. Steve muttered under his breath and subsided. They passed the water bottle back and forth. Sam didn’t ask the question again. He didn't think he’d have to.

When they finished drinking, Steve wiped his mouth and said quietly, “This is the last place I was—me.”

“You ever get used to it?” Sam asked, looking straight ahead over hollow shells of buildings and waist-high trees. The wind was creaking the rusted barracks door back and forth just enough to make it squeak a little, and he could feel it stirring the surface of the wings, the razor-thin feathers. They were warm along the top edges, soaking up the hazy sunlight. The joints where they met his back felt sore, the same way his shoulders and his thighs felt sore.

“Sometimes I wake up and I’m in my bunk,” Steve said, pointing to a window. “Fourth from the door, over there. I’m me again. And for one minute, I feel like—I’m home. Like the war’s over.” He dropped his arm. “And then I wake up for real.”

“Somebody told you they’d wave a magic wand and take it back, would you do it?”

“Probably not,” Steve said. “It’s nice not to get out of breath after walking a block.”

Sam snorted. “Yeah, cause that’s why you’d say no.”

“It is, though,” Sam said. “One of the reasons, anyway.” He shrugged. “That helps, sometimes.”

“Silver lining, huh?” Sam said, after a moment.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Something like that.”

Sam nodded and took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s go again.”

Steve stood and offered a hand to pull him up.

Sometime on the fifth day of long running starts down the dusty, overgrown track, Sam came off the ground and stayed off, the wings suddenly moving with him the way he needed them to. He whipped through the air, faster and faster, and he couldn’t help it, he was yelling at the top of his lungs, wordless roller-coaster scream as he went into a whirl and came out of it going straight up, up, up, blue everywhere and sun in his eyes and Steve down below receding into an action figure. Sam turned mid-air and dived to pass him in a huge swoop, still yelling as he shot by and back up, Steve turning to watch and laughing at him and Sam didn’t give a damn, he was _flying_ , and then an updraft caught him on his way back down and he ended up tackling right into Steve, the two of them going tumbling head over heels like a cartoon dog-and-cat fight until they washed up against the side of the barracks.

“Ow,” Sam said. His voice sounded hoarse in his own ears. He had a leg somewhere up locked with one of Steve’s arms and Steve’s shoulder was jammed up under his chin, and the wings hurt, but man, he felt _amazing_.

“Ow,” Steve agreed. He wasn’t trying to move, just lying flat, draped over Sam’s chest. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Sam said. They untangled, and Sam got up and stretched his arms and legs and wings out, carefully. “Something feels off back there. You see anything?”

“Looks like you broke a couple of feathers,” Steve said. “There’s a piece hanging—”

He put his hand on the wing. “Shit!” Sam said, strangled. It felt like lights going on all around where Steve’s hand was, a whole network of sensation sparking to life. One of those full-body shivers hit him, not cold, just his skin tingling bright all over, running down his calves to his toes and then back up to make his shoulders jitter. The wing under Steve’s hand moved and set off another crackling shiver, and the feathers stirred with it.

Steve pulled his hand back fast. “Did I do something?”

Sam bent down, braced on his knees, panting out. “Whooo, yeah. Whoa.”

Steve’s eyebrow went up. “Yeah?”

Sam straightened up and stretched backwards, hands braced in the small of his back. The wings stretched with him. He could still feel where Steve’s hand had been, vivid, like that patch had been turned up to eleven and the rest of the wing around it was still on mute. He could feel the wind stirring the edges of those feathers. The faint pain of the damaged ones was there, too, but like a scraped knee; his body telling him it wasn’t anything to worry about. “ _Oh_ , yeah,” he said, shaking out his head. “Damn.”

Steve’s mouth was starting to curl up, smirking. “Doesn’t sound like you’re complaining,” he said, sly and flirty.

It was the kind of thing Sam ordinarily would’ve batted back to him nice and easy, part of the back and forth that made them work, venting the heat that built up once in a while. It happened when you were with somebody all the time, a man you liked, respected, loved; a man you’d die for, so your body sometimes asked why the hell not lie down for. Except there were good reasons not to go there, and even now Sam still knew damn well it was a bad idea. Their dance cards hadn’t gotten any less full, and this wasn’t going to be something light, between them. He’d had that before, something that you could pick up and put down, like a good glass of Scotch after a tough day. This was heroin straight to the brain.

And they both knew it, so for now they made cute, kept it a running joke with just enough spice to it to make jerking off in the morning a little more fun and let them stay in place. Both of them knowing it was going to be okay, they were still going to be good together, even if they never made it to the other side. But Sam’s head was spinning and his body was setting off fireworks, and he was going there after all. “No,” he said, half laughing, already high. “No, I am _not_ complaining.”

Steve got it, fast. He didn’t back up. The smirk fell off his mouth, lips parting to breathe, arms uncrossing to his sides. He was _waiting_ for it, and Sam couldn’t do anything but close that space between them, muscling in on him while Steve kept standing his ground. Sam put his hands against the barracks wall with a bang, either side of Steve’s head. Steve was staring at Sam’s mouth, and he shut his eyes as Sam leaned in.

Steve’s breath huffed out against his lips, a small noise, a gasp, and they were kissing, sweet and hard and perfect; Steve’s hands were getting on his hips, bringing their bodies tight. He slid his hands up under Steve’s shirt, warm smooth skin, damp with sweat. “Oh, _man_ ,” Sam said, mumbling through kisses along Steve’s jaw, his neck.

Steve tipped up for them, ragged gasping. “Yes. Sam. Yes,” and then he was pulling Sam to the ground, down on top of him, their bodies slotting together and Steve’s legs hot up against his sides, their hips grinding. “Oh. _Oh_.” Steve sounded like he was going to cry, like his body was relearning something it had forgot, painful and good at the same time. Sam knew the feeling. The wings on his back were spreading, shading them from the sun overhead, and Steve was staring up at him, dazzled.

He took hold of the edges of Steve’s t-shirt collar where it had gotten frayed in their tumble and tore it straight down the side. Steve looked down at himself and gasped out half a laugh, helplessly, like he was just noticing his own body, too. Sam slowed down a little. “This _isn’t_ your first time,” he said, not quite a question, sliding his hand up and down Steve’s chest, palming all those sweet firm curves.

“It’s still—it’s still new,” Steve said. “Every time. Sam, please, I don’t, I don’t want to—”

“No taking it slow this time, huh?” Sam said.

“No,” Steve said. “Please.”

Sam moved against him, sliding back and forth slow and easy, drag of the cotton of their pants between them, thick seams stuttering over each other, feeling Steve through them, the shift of his weight, heat of his body: new signals, like maybe he could expand the idea of his body to fit this in, too, for a while. It wasn’t any effort to keep himself up; it wasn’t any effort to push in, push down. His whole body was working together, wings handling the pressure his weight had used to provide. Steve groaned and rocked up to meet him, his face gone frowning and shocked, mouth open. Soft little panting grunts coming out of him, sweat rolling off his forehead. Sam bent down and kissed him again, sweet warm mouth, hungry for it; Steve kissed and kissed him back. His hands were sliding over Sam’s bare sides, into the small of his back and up, gliding easily over sweat-slick skin. They were close to the wings, so close.

“Touch—touch them,” Sam panted. “Touch them some more.”

Steve shuddered and kissed him again, hard, and slid one hand onto the base of the wing right where it met Sam’s back, where titanium fibers wove in and out of his body. The first brush of his fingers against the lower spur sent another shock through Sam’s body, a sweet electrical jolt that woke up that long line of the wing’s frame and made him curse, grab Steve’s head and kiss him desperately, letting gasps out into his mouth. Steve shuddered as hard as if he were feeling it too. His fingers slid carefully into the feathers, brushing against the fine edges, and Sam pounded his fist on the ground just to let some of the energy loose.

But the jolting kept coming, more of it; spiderwebbing out into shudders that wracked him all over, fast, too fast. Steve jerked his hand back and grabbed him by the arms. “Sam,” he said, his voice coming in through static. A long needle-punch stabbing pain shot through the right side of Sam’s skull, a bright blaze. He was curling up, helpless, rolling away over the ground, the wings flat beneath him and unable to fold back in. Steve was hovering over him, not daring to touch. “Sam!”

Sam didn’t recognize the voice that spoke, sharp, peremptory: “Hold him still!” But Steve grabbed him by the arms and pinned him down. The sun was blazing straight down, his eyes watering with pain and the glare. A shadow came between him and the sky, a head, and something cold and metal pressed against his back, between the blades of his wings. “This will hurt,” the voice said.

“Do it!” Sam said through his teeth, because everything hurt already, in the way that meant something was seriously fucking wrong, and then a burst of white noise pain exploded along his spine and up through the inside of his skull.

He jerked out of it gasping, the static and the pain clearing at the same time. He was sitting up, Steve’s hands on his arms still holding him. “What the _fuck_ ,” Sam said, and turned his head to follow the line of Steve’s wide, helpless stare. The Winter Soldier — Bucky? — was standing a foot away, tossing away a thin white disk into the dust with his metal hand.

Bucky lifted his head and stared back at them with unblinking eyes, mouth a still line, blank like he didn’t have any feelings about the situation. Like he didn’t have feelings at all. He was wearing a black hoodie, black jeans, black cap, close enough to civilian gear; he still didn’t look civilian. He barely looked human.

“Bucky,” Steve said. “Bucky. Are you — you’re here. Where. Will you—” Then he stopped, pulled himself together, and looked over at the disk: it was still smoking faintly. “What did you just do to Sam? What was that?”

“A low-level EMP injector,” Bucky said.

Sam put a hand on the back of his neck. “You just fired an EMP into my _spine_?”

Bucky transferred the stare to him. He still hadn’t blinked. “You were moving into final integration. I had to disrupt it.”

Sam stared at him. On his back, the wings had been put back on mute, all that bright sensation dulled away. “Why?”

“It’s a set up,” Bucky said. “Hydra let you go.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The damaged feathers had stopped hurting. “They look better,” Steve said after a moment, from behind his back. “They’re — I think they’re repairing themselves.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With many thanks to cesperanza and lim and therienne!

The damaged feathers had stopped hurting. “They look better,” Steve said after a moment, from behind his back. “They’re — I think they’re repairing themselves.”

“Molecular assemblers,” Bucky said. They’d gone inside the barracks. He was putting down a tiny black box, sliding a micro SD card into the side. A projector light came on in the front and threw up ten pages of documents on the wall, full of diagrams and wings. They hadn’t bothered to put a face on the human figure in dotted-outline form beneath the sketches.

“What, like — tiny robots? Inside me?” Sam said, sickened. “How many of these things?”

“Approximately ten million,” Bucky said. “Once you fully integrate the wings into your body map, they’ll automatically be retasked to destroy the structures in your brain that allow you to access episodic memory.” He slid a finger across the top of the box and the document blurred by, landing on a new page: _PHASE 2_ , with a dozen slices of a brain PET scan labeled _Wilson, S_., and a few tiny parts marked out with arrows and pink highlighter.

Sam recognized the photos. The VA hospital had put him through that scan after the helicarriers, three months ago. _Better safe than sorry_ , the smiling doctor had said, when Sam had told him he hadn’t taken a hit to the head. He clenched his fists on the table. He wondered if he went back, whether that doctor would still be there. He wondered how many of the doctors at the hospital this time around had been Hydra, too, planted to make sure their rat was running nicely through the maze; that PT who’d kept trying to touch the wings.

“How do we get these things out?” Steve said.

“You don’t,” Bucky said.

“How do we _stop it?_ ” Steve said, leaning in towards him.

“You don’t,” Bucky said. He met Steve’s eyes, but his face didn’t change. Steve stared at him, helpless, like he was looking for something else there and didn’t know what to do without it.

“How much time have I got?” Sam said quietly. Steve flinched and turned away.

Bucky shrugged one shoulder, economical. “Controlled flight was projected at 80% integration. Another week. Maybe.”

“Okay. There anything we _can_ do?”

Bucky shrugged again. He didn’t say anything, just stood looking them, face blank. Sam had the feeling he was like an engine running in neutral. Somehow, even after everything Hydra had done to him, Bucky had recognized a threat, he’d managed to put together a plan. But now he’d run through it, and he didn’t have anything else left. They’d hollowed him out from the inside so deep that they’d taken his name, almost everything he was.

And whatever mistakes they’d made, leaving Bucky enough scraps to put together somebody who could come back to Steve with a warning, they wouldn’t make it again. _We have made significant improvements to the process_ , Kardan had said. Sam felt her hand on his back again, the cold thin fingers patting him in a sick parody of comfort. Maybe she’d thought it _was_ comforting: _pretty soon you won’t remember any of this shit happening to you_.

He turned and walked away down the aisle between the rusting cots. He had to move. He was too angry to think, too scared. He’d thought he was on a straight line: get back on his feet, get the wings working, get back to fighting the good fight. Worst-case scenario, he’d been taken out of the game for good; and he could live with that. He knew guys who’d been taken off the field with a lot worse than a deadweight on their back.

But being turned into a Hydra weapon—even though he knew better, that felt like something that shouldn’t be possible in a world that made sense. Something that nobody should be able to do to him, something only he could do to himself. Like a vampire that couldn’t come in without an invitation, or making a deal with the devil; if you didn’t sign on the dotted line, they couldn’t make you a monster.

Sam sat down on one of the cots, barely a squeak of the old cheap bedframe under his unnatural weight. The mattress smelled of mildew and decades of rot. He knew better. He’d looked through enough of the Winter Soldier’s file to know the things Hydra had made Bucky do. How many people they’d made him kill. He looked down at his own hands. Ten million machines floating under his skin. The wings were heavy and still on his back, folded; his wings, except they were Hydra’s wings. They’d been Hydra’s wings all along.

He could hear Steve’s voice behind him, murmuring too low to make out words; a few answers from Bucky; a silence. After a while Steve’s footsteps came down the aisle and paused. Sam looked up. “Mind if I,” Steve said, awkward. “Or I could—” He looked down the aisle, offering to go away.

“Pull up a cot,” Sam said.

Steve sat down across from him, heavily, and held out his phone. “I got in touch with Stark,” he said. “I sent him the files Bucky found.”

There was a single text message: _30 sec answer: reprogramming. Wings $$$, assemblers $$$$$, one compatible subject out of 5,000 person test subject pool, no way did Hydra not leave themselves a bugfix/upgrade path. Get me the private key they used, 40-60 odds I can fix it. On my way to Stark Tower, there in 22hrs._

“I think the doctor is our best bet for finding the key,” Steve said. “Kardan.”

“Bucky have any idea where she is?”

“He knows the five biggest Hydra bases in the region. We’ll hit them all if we have to.”

Those weren’t good odds to stack on top of the 40% that Stark was giving. Kardan wasn’t an idiot; if they started to go after all the Hydra bases in the area, she’d go to ground somewhere else. “Okay,” Sam said anyway, because that’s what there was to do. If there was nothing else, he was fine doing all the damage to Hydra he could.

Steve nodded without meeting his eyes. The slump of his shoulders said he knew it, too. But fuck it: Sam wasn’t going to sit here and cry. He leaned in and grabbed Steve under the chin, lifted his face and pulled him in. Steve shuddered in his grip, and then he was leaning in too; he caught Sam by the arms and they were kissing harder, desperate. Sam could feel Steve’s panic right there in the shake of his hands, the way they held too tight, the stuttering of his breath; he was one step away from tears.

Sam shut his eyes and pushed his own panic back. He cupped Steve’s head, hair a couple months past regulation length now, soft and damp with sweat; he kissed him deep and slow. He wanted to push Steve down, wanted to fuck him right here on the squeaking cot, the old mattress. If he was going down, he wanted this last selfish sweetness to take with him. He wanted to blaze smoke and fire behind him as he went.

Steve jerked in his hands, though, and Sam pulled back. Bucky had popped out of nowhere again and was standing in the aisle at the foot of the bed, looking at them. Steve was flushing pink down his neck and into his shirt, but there wasn’t any judgment in Bucky’s face; he was just studying them like they were puzzle-pieces he didn’t know how to fit together.

He said, “There’s someone coming.”

#

It was a single car, a black SUV. The driver behind the smoked windows didn’t try to hide: just turned in through the gates and rolled up to the barracks, and then Natasha pushed the door open and climbed out, manila folder in her hand. “Hey, boys,” she said. Her eyes darted briefly to Bucky: he’d moved to stand on her four, flanking position, fixed on her like she was a target and he was just waiting to be launched. His eyes flicked to Steve and back, looking for a signal. Her voice stayed light, relaxed. “I hear you’ve been having fun without me.”

“Where have you been?” Steve said tightly. “I’ve been trying to get you for three weeks.”

“Fury wasn’t completely satisfied with the extraction mission,” Natasha said. “He asked me to look into a few details.” She held her folder out to Steve.

Sam looked over his shoulder as he leafed through the pages: a set of personnel dossiers, with photos of unfamiliar faces. Steve was frowning down at them. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Who are these people?”

“The strike team Fury sent to help you extract Sam.”

Steve jerked his head up. “What? I’ve never seen any of them.”

“No, you haven’t,” she said. “They’re all dead. Hydra intercepted them and sent their own people instead.”

Steve stared at her. “They helped me blow up _their own base?_ ”

“That’s why there weren’t more guards,” Sam said abruptly. “That’s why I wasn’t chained down.”

It all made a sick kind of sense. Hydra hadn’t left anything to chance: they’d made sure Steve would find him, get him to doctors and back on his feet, working hard on the PT. And while they were at it, they’d made their team look suspicious enough that Steve hadn’t trusted Fury, hadn’t wanted to go back to SHIELD for help after. It made Sam want to be sick, furious. Steve had been working for them all along; _he’d_ been working for them, everything they did just helping Hydra to get their new supersoldier up and running.

Steve was frowning down at the rest of her folder, his jaw clenched; he’d gotten it, too. “This one,” he said, lifting up the last in the pile, an earnest, round-faced kid maybe twenty-five, with bug eyes and an anxious expression, with the name _Todd Martin_. “He _was_ on the team.”

Natasha nodded. “He was the mole. He was the team’s comm specialist.”

“How’d he slip past you and Fury?” Steve demanded.

“He didn’t _slip_ past anybody,” Natasha said with an edge in her voice. “He shot two Hydra agents to save a critical disk drive about a month ago. After that, he was allowed to have access to information on two separate major operations against the Hydra cells in Europe. That’s how he moved up the chain of confidence. Hydra got him into that position by compromising virtually their entire European operation.” Her eyes flicked over to Sam. “They’ve spent a lot on this. Billions.”

Billions of dollars, at least three bases, half a dozen agents burned including Martin and Gladell— “Just so they could have a flying supersoldier?” Sam said, his voice rising, because what the _fuck_ , Hydra had loaded all of that on his back: what the hell did they think they were getting out of this?

Steve moved in closer to him, like a solid bulwark, not quite touching but close enough Sam could have leaned against him. He didn’t; didn’t look into Steve’s face. He knew when Steve had signed on for something like this, seventy-odd years ago, it had taken a hell of lot more than Steve had ever bargained for; maybe more than even he would’ve given. Right now that only made Sam want to howl that at least Steve _had_ signed on; at least he’d had a choice.

“I can’t tell you,” Natasha said quietly. “We don’t have the full picture yet. But whatever they want this badly, chances are we don’t want them to get it.”

“Tony thinks he can reprogram the assemblers,” Steve said. “We need to track down the doctor who did the operation.”

Natasha nodded. “I might have something for you.”

#

They moved into the barracks: Bucky’s projector showing the Hydra bases, mapped out in red glowing points up and down the east coast. Natasha set up her own next to his. “We’ve gotten a list of all Martin’s encrypted transmissions from the last year,” she said. “We know he was communicating with the base you destroyed. With any luck, he also talked to the new one.”

She flipped the switch, and a pattern of blue dots went up all over the map, concentrated in clusters, and a single deep purple point shone out, right over the base in Princeton, New Jersey.

Natasha straightened up. “There’s our target,” she said softly.

Steve looked at Bucky, standing in the corner just to one side of the door, almost invisible by contrast to the bright rectangle of the open doorway. “What do you know about that one?”

“It’s a tier one base,” Bucky said. “Civilian presence on above-ground levels, limited means of access to lower levels, two defense squadrons on duty at all times.” He paused and looked at each one of them in turn; Sam could almost see the gears turning. After a moment Bucky said, “We can’t penetrate it alone.”

The way he said it didn’t leave any room for maybe or argument. Steve turned back to Natasha. “Do you have any people you can be _sure_ about? And I don’t mean ones that walked themselves up your chain of confidence.”

“Not many,” Natasha said, “but I can make a few calls.”

“Good,” Steve said. “Have anyone you can get rendezvous with us at Princeton in four hours. We’ll hit the base tonight after dark. In the meantime, we’ll get up there and scout our exit routes — ”

“You’re going to have to handle that yourself,” Natasha said

Steve paused. “What? Where are _you_ going?”

“Nowhere,” Natasha said. “Sam and I are going to work on buying some time. The work you’ve been doing to improve his control, that’s been accelerating the integration. We can reverse some of the therapy techniques to inhibit it, instead.”

Steve flinched. “If we hadn’t been training—”

“Don’t,” Sam said. “Don’t go there, man.” He ran a hand down his face and looked at Natasha. She met his eyes, her own clear and green and steady. But no way did she not know that she’d just jabbed Steve below the belt; the kind of hit that would make him not think too hard about what she’d just said.

“That sounds good,” Sam said finally. “I wouldn’t mind putting some time back on the clock.”

Steve gave a small nod, his jaw still clenched up tight. “Okay,” he said, low. “Fine.” He looked at Bucky. “Are you — coming with me?”

“Yes,” Bucky said.

Steve nodded. Then he hesitated and looked back. “Sam,” he said, his voice riding the edge up to breaking, and Sam wanted to kiss Steve again, right now, maybe for the last time. He felt the acceleration of hope like pressure, almost worse than knowing there was no way out: like he’d been suspended in the weightless moment at the top of a mid-air loop, and now gravity was grabbing back onto him with both hands.

He stepped in close to Steve instead, put his hands around the back of Steve’s neck, pulled his forehead in. “I’ll see you in a few hours,” he said, quiet. Steve nodded against him, just a small movement, and then Sam let him go and Steve was walking out of the barracks, head lowered a little, shoulders hunched. Bucky followed him.

Sam waited until he heard the bike engine roar up, and then he looked at Natasha. “Okay,” he said. “So what are we actually doing?”

“Since Hydra planned your escape, we have to assume they’ve got a tracker in you,” Natasha said. “If you head towards Princeton, they’ll know we’re coming.”

“Can you get it out of me?”

“Probably,” she said. “The problem is, Hydra frequently rigs body trackers to explode when removed.”

Sam blew out a breath.

“I’m betting that they haven’t risked making this one ultra-sensitive,” Natasha added. “They wouldn’t want to lose their...” She paused.

“Investment,” Sam finished for her, flatly.

Natasha nodded. “I should have at least a five-minute window to work with.”

“Five minutes, huh? Piece of cake,” Sam said. She quirked her mouth up in answer. “Won’t they notice if it’s been taken out, though?”

“Well, they _would_ ,” Natasha said. “But fortunately, I’ve got someone here to help with that.”

She led him back outside and popped the trunk of her car: a skinny guy with a hipster beard and scared eyes was inside, bruised and tied up and gagged with duct tape, staring up at them. He was lying on a pile of coiled-up chain. Natasha gave him a bright smile and looked at Sam. “Did you ever meet Agent Gladell in person before he gave you and Steve the bad intel about that Hydra ambush?”

“No,” Sam said grimly.

“I’d vouched for him to you,” Natasha said. “I take that kind of thing personally. I thought this might balance the books all around.”

“What exactly are you planning to do with him?”

“We take the tracker out of you, pop it into him. If we’re lucky, Hydra will only notice it as a temporary blip in the signal. If we’re unlucky — ” She shrugged. “I won’t weep if they decide to pull the trigger. Will you?”

Gladell stared up, scared-pale; the guy who’d put Sam on a platter and handed him over to be turned into a killing machine aimed at the people he loved. “I’ll live with it,” Sam said. “And after?”

“We secure him in the middle of the grounds and leave food and water at the full length of the chain,” she said. “He’ll have to move around the base to reach them. By the time they notice that he’s staying within a fairly small radius, we should be done hitting the base in Princeton. One way or another.” Natasha leaned down towards Gladell, but stopped when Sam caught her arm.

“One more thing,” he said, quietly. “You want to balance the books with me, you’re going to have to promise me something else.”

She straightened up, met his eyes.

“If this goes south,” Sam said, “I need you to take me down, and I don’t mean put me in a cell somewhere while you all try and find a way to fix it. I’m telling you now, I’m not up for that. I want a full-on funeral pyre, and I want you all to get drunk and cry about just how awesome I was, and then that’s going to be it. Don’t leave parts of me lying around for Hydra to use. Not for anybody to use. That’s what you owe me.”

Natasha didn’t look away. “You have my word,” she said.

Sam nodded. “Then let’s get this done.” 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You need to start looking at the big picture, Rogers,” Natasha said, cold and hard. “Thanks to the fallout from Project Insight, Hydra’s not a covert organization anymore. They don’t need a ghost.” She jerked her chin towards Bucky. “If they want to stay on the playing field, what they need now is a highly visible threat, a weapon they can turn on anyone, anywhere. That’s what this is about.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With many thanks to Cesperanza for beta!

Natasha worked neatly. The incision in Sam’s arm where she took out the tracker was less than half an inch long. The sting faded fast even for that, though. By the time Natasha took the exit for Princeton off the highway, Sam peeled away the butterfly bandages, and there wasn’t anything under them but smooth skin. His passenger robots hard at work, he guessed; he had no other explanation. He hadn’t healed that fast from the surgery — was it just that the incision had been smaller, or were they getting quicker? Natasha glanced over; she didn’t say anything.

They picked up Steve and Bucky on the outskirts of the campus, on a dark road behind the football stadium: no game tonight, and the lights were mostly off. Steve climbed in the back and said without preamble, “She’s here. Bucky found her on campus security video arriving three weeks ago, a few hours before we took out the other base.”

Sam’s gut tightened up.

“Once we enter the building, figure we’ll need ten minutes to get to Kardan, ten minutes to extract,” Steve said. “Natasha, can your people keep our exit route open that long?”

“Can you manage with fifteen?” she said.

“No,” Bucky said.

“We’ll take what we can get,” Steve said.

“We’ll almost certainly be killed during the extraction,” Bucky said.

“We’re _doing_ this,” Steve said, sharply. In the rear-view, Sam saw him looking hard at Bucky.

Bucky stared back, then abruptly gave a shrug, one-shouldered. “Why the hell not.” He sounded almost human for a moment; then his face blanked out again and he looked away, out the window.

“I’ll see what we can do to stretch it,” Natasha said.

“Where are your people meeting us?” Steve said.

She was pulling up to the curb. “Over there.”

But when they climbed out of the car, there was only one guy waiting across the quad, and he looked more like a stray Princeton professor out for a walk: slouchy blazer and a baseball cap, rumpled and a little uncertain, looking around himself with his hands in his pockets. Sam wondered for a minute if it was a coincidence, if he was just somebody out for a walk.

But Steve was staring at the guy. He looked at Natasha. “Are you _kidding?_ ” He jerked his hand around at the campus: quiet, the big old buildings covered with ivy, students walking on the paths. “He shouldn’t even _be_ here! If Hydra took a shot at him — ”

“Relax, Rogers,” Natasha said.

“Relax? You just brought an atomic bomb into a civilian area,” Steve said.

Next to Sam, Bucky had gone tense and alert, eyes fixed unblinking on the man, like he was tracking an extreme danger. But the guy hadn’t even noticed them yet; he was just idly fidgeting around, rubbing his hands together, looking at the passing students a little nervously.

“I brought a _deterrent_ ,” she said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re a little short on people we can trust right now. Bringing in an entire strike force isn’t an alternative when half of them might warn Kardan and start shooting us in the back. This is the best option we have. Now stop trying to tell me my job and let’s go.”

She set out across the lawn, a deliberately relaxed stroll. Steve muttered something under his breath that wanted to be a curse and took off after her, before Sam could demand to know who the hell the guy _was_. He followed them, Bucky bringing up the rear, and Natasha stopped still a good ten paces away from the man. “Hello, Dr. Banner,” she said. “Thanks for coming,” and Sam went cold, belatedly putting the face together with blurry newspaper photographs.

“Yeah, sure,” Banner said. He was staring back at them all, not so much wary as anxious. “I thought you wanted me to take a look at something.”

“I do,” Natasha said, smiling. “It’s in the third basement of the new Chemistry lab building.”

He nodded a little. “Uh huh. And, uh, what else is in there?”

“A Hydra base!” Steve said, glaring at Natasha.

“Yeah,” Banner said, looking around the quad, his face furrowed. “So, uh, I don’t think this is a really good idea, given there are a lot of, um, breakable — people — around here?”

“Yeah, it’s _not_ ,” Sam said. He caught Natasha’s arm and pulled her around to face him. “My mom lives in Harlem,” he said flatly. “Last time the Hulk stopped by there, I dug three bodies out of what was left of my dad’s old church.”

Banner flinched. His face slid out of the half smile, sagging into just plain tired. “I’m sorry,” he said, low.

Sam took a minute and tamped down the anger. “I get it wasn’t under your direct control,” he said. “But I’m not turning that loose around a bunch of college kids.”

“For what it’s worth, neither am I,” Banner said.

“And neither am I,” Natasha said. “Bruce, I know about the inhibitor.”

“What inhibitor?” Steve said sharply.

Banner had gone completely still. Natasha was looking at him head-on, steadily. After a moment he looked away. “It keeps the other guy from coming out,” he said.

Steve paused, frowning, and said, “But if you’ve taken this thing and Hydra goes after you — ”

Bruce shrugged a little. “It’s held through some pretty heavy-duty electroshock,” he said. “I haven’t tried doing any, uh. Permanent damage.”

“You want him to just stand there and — scare them?” Steve said to Natasha incredulously.

“That’s the idea,” she said. “You need to start looking at the big picture, Rogers,” she added, cold and hard. “Thanks to the fallout from Project Insight, Hydra’s not a covert organization anymore. They don’t need a ghost.” She jerked her chin towards Bucky. “If they want to stay on the playing field, what they need now is a highly visible threat, a weapon they can turn on anyone, anywhere. That’s what this is about.”

She turned on Sam. “And that’s why this isn’t just about what you’re willing to risk for yourself. Whatever they’re trying to turn you into, it may not be as powerful as the Hulk, but when they turn you on a city, they’ll do it on _purpose_.”

Sam’s gut knotted up. Everything she said made sense, except for how it didn’t make any goddamn sense at all. He couldn’t help thinking about the way the incision had healed. “How exactly do you think that’s even going to _work?_ I’m just a _person,_ ” he said, more a protest than an argument.

“So was I,” Banner said softly, unhappily. “So were — all of us.” Into the silence, he said to Natasha. “It only lasts for fifteen minutes. At most.”

“That’s fifteen minutes we can’t get any other way,” Natasha said. “When you get into position, take the dose. When your time runs out, _you_ get out.” She tossed him the keys to her car.

He caught them mid-air and stared down at them. He looked up again. “I’ll wait to take it as long as I can,” he said.

#

College kids were still trickling out of the building, carrying bookbags, talking about tests and weekend parties. “Put your hand in your pocket,” Natasha told Bucky, and curled her arm around his metal one, tossing her hair long and loose, chin lifted, aloof. Abruptly, she was stunningly beautiful, like she’d flipped a switch, and people started turning heads to look at her in a way that made them miss Bucky’s blank, cold face; and the rest of them, too. She said something to Bucky in Russian and laughed; he laughed too, an ordinary, human sound, and Sam saw Steve flinch: but it wasn’t real. Bucky’s eyes didn’t change; he was just performing on cue.

They made it in unchallenged past the couple of bored security guards at the front door, and into the fire stairs. Those only went down to a single basement level; the door was locked from the other side. Natasha pulled out lockpicks; before she could start, Bucky kicked it open with one brutal move. It hung, swinging.

“Maybe a little less noise would be good?” Banner said, raising an eyebrow.

“This isn’t a secured entry,” Bucky said.

Sam glanced at Natasha, who shrugged and put away her picks. “He’s not wrong. If they were monitoring this entryway, they’d be getting false positives three times a day. The fun starts when we crack the next level.”

The basement was a big open space filled with shelves in aisles so narrow that Sam’s arms brushed up against the unlabeled boxes stacked on them, more dusty than they should’ve been if they were actually being used. The whole place was discouraging — it probably sent anybody who stumbled on it back upstairs better than any _keep out_ sign would have done. Bucky led them unerringly to a wall covered with a massive filing cabinet, also locked. He pointed to one shelf in the middle and let Natasha go to work; when she got the lock open, the whole front of the cabinet swung open, a false front for another elevator with a keypad and a camera lens over it.

Natasha studied it, then said abruptly, “Do they know you’re a hostile now?”

“No,” Bucky said after a moment. “Probably not.”

“Think you could sell them on your trying to come in from the cold?”

Steve stiffened up. “You don’t have to,” he told Bucky.

“Stay out of view,” Bucky said. He moved in front of the keypad and punched in a long code, standing in front of the camera.

An intercom crackled to life. “What are you doing—” There was a brief interruption on the other side, muffled voices, then the voice came back. “Report your status.”

“Mission not accomplished,” Bucky said. “Target lost. I require new intelligence.”

Another muffled conference, then, “Who is your target?”

“Captain America,” Bucky said.

A whisper of “—told you! Still operating on last—” and then “Proceed to second level for debriefing and new parameters.”

“You are not authorized to give me new parameters,” Bucky said sharply. “Identify yourself and present credentials.” He put a hand on the pistol at his waist.

Faintly, “Oh, shit, who can—” and more hurried noises. Sam couldn’t help but take a little heart; at least Hydra was scrambling some, too. They didn’t have all the cards in the deck yet. And they were also hurting for help: maybe the Winter Soldier wasn’t what they really needed anymore, but that didn’t mean they were going to look a gift assassin in the mouth when he walked up to their door.

Finally the intercom said, “Proceed to third level and report to Agent Morova, ID number 14350100513, who will present credentials and provide you with additional intelligence.”

Bucky was silent a moment, then said, “That is acceptable,” and took his hand off the gun. The elevator dinged softly; Natasha quickly jerked a hand, motioning them all to either side of the doors before they slid open. She was already rigging a thin flat piece of metal a little like a jimmy for a car door; she slid it on the floor between the elevator doors as Bucky stalked inside.

He turned around to face out. Sam was pressed up against Steve, the two of them crouching to one side: he could feel tension thrumming hard through Steve’s body as the doors slid shut on Bucky’s face. Sam put a hand on Steve’s shoulder and squeezed hard; Steve silently put his hand on top and gripped back. Everything happening at the same time, and no time to process any of it, but Sam knew what it was doing to Steve to send Bucky back down into their hands, even like this.

As soon as the doors closed, Natasha was in front of them, pulling the metal strip up and between the elevator doors. They opened onto the shaft, the elevator already descending below, and Natasha jumped instantly. Sam took Bruce’s arm, Steve on the other side, and they all jumped together. The wings on his back tried to jerk open, stirring against his shirt; an instinct to glide down.

They hit with thumps, but nobody tripped. Natasha was already kneeling at the base of the cable, clamping a small metal box around it, running long thin wires to the rest of the electrical systems. Steve went straight for the access panel, behind a heavy-duty magnetic lock. Sam silently took up a position next to him, nudging him over to take a grip next to his. Steve threw him a glance: Sam usually sat this part out, since anything Steve couldn’t bust open alone, another pair of ordinary hands weren’t going to help with. Then Steve looked away and made room. They threw themselves into it together, tendons standing out on Steve’s neck, Sam’s arms prickling hard all over like pins and needles, and abruptly the lock gave way with a jerk so fast they both sat down hard on their asses.

The panel was open, looking down on Bucky’s head, and the elevator dinged faintly again; the doors were sliding open. A woman was standing in front of him with a five-man squad of soldiers behind her, all armed with shock sticks; Bucky stepped out, and Natasha said, “Here we go,” and dived through the panel headfirst.

Steve jumped after her, and Sam followed, but by the time they were through, it was all over: five men down and twitching, Natasha’s little stingers on their necks, and Bucky casually tossing aside the unfortunate Agent Morova with his iron hand around her neck. They stood up, and an alarm started flashing, lights going red. Bruce let himself down through the access panel and stood inside the elevator. He was rolling his left sleeve back down. “Okay, kids,” he said. “You’re on the clock.”

Natasha handed him a small flat remote control, a single button. “When you need to go,” she said, “push it. The elevator will take you back up to the basement. Until then, just — stay right here and let them see you.” She pointed up to the security camera peering down at them.

Bruce looked straight up at the camera, then took the remote. “Yeah,” he said. “Good luck.”

“Let’s get moving,” Steve said. “Bucky, take point. I’ve got our six.” 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Under different circumstances, Sam would’ve felt great about being in it with them, part of a crew he could barely hang with, even giving it everything he had. He’d always felt good about it with Steve, with Natasha, the missions they’d run together. But this time he wasn’t having trouble staying in the game.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With many thanks to Cesperanza and counteragent for beta!

The four of them moved through Hydra’s guts fast, smoother than they had any right to be: Hydra soldiers coming at them from all sides, and without a word said they found their places, slotting together into a team: Bucky rolling through hallways like a tank with his even, measured pace, using machine gun spurts to clear the way; Steve covering their backs and pushing back attempts to ambush them; Natasha batting cleanup, so she had eyes and ears mostly free to warn them.

Under different circumstances, Sam would’ve felt great about being in it with them, part of a crew he could barely hang with, even giving it everything he had. He’d always felt good about it with Steve, with Natasha, the missions they’d run together. But this time he wasn’t having trouble staying in the game.

He’d figured he was going to be just another gun at the party down here: a hundred feet underground in an ant tunnel six feet across, wings weren’t going to be worth shit. Except it turned out while Hydra had been building themselves a flying weapon, they’d thrown in the full options package: a targeting system they probably figured on using to pick out victims from a thousand feet up, and the bird’s-eye view worked just fine on the ground, too. His eyes kept going straight to targets like somebody was pointing them out straight to his brain, catching tiny flickers of movement. Then his body swiveled and his hands squeezed the triggers, and the bad guys went down before they’d even managed to get out a shot. He was picking off guys darting a fast look around a corner two hundred yards away, and it still felt like taking candy-ass shots at twenty paces.

Maybe the worst of it was having the others acknowledge it: they started out covering for him a little, automatic, the way you did with the guy on the team who was behind the curve, just a highly-trained special operative and not a damn superhero. By the time they reached the fourth floor, they’d quit doing that; Natasha and Bucky had slotted him straight into long-range offense. Bucky wasn’t bothering to target enemies unless they were stupid enough to get in arm’s reach, and Natasha was taking out every hidden camera and pickup instead, tossing him her spare clips when he ran out of ammo.

It made tactical sense, but it still felt like being turned into a weapon, and Sam wasn’t a hundred percent sure he was the one doing all the aiming. Steve was the only one still trying to cover for him, jerking around every so often to see if he needed an assist; the way he _had_ needed one plenty of times before, down in the guts of a Hydra base with bad guys coming out of the woodwork, but this time Sam was pretty sure that was only because Steve was feeling the same knot of denial he had sitting in his own stomach. There was a low deep headache building, the first faint twinges of it, back at the right side of his skull.

Then Bucky shot open a door on a room full of screens and panicking scientists, screaming, and even through the smoke and chaos Sam’s sight locked in on Dr. Kardan like she was standing in front of him: at the far end of the room typing a last few strokes rapidly into a laptop, steps away from an open door. He raised his gun and abruptly it felt like the world narrowed down: he put the first bullet straight through her right arm, and the second one through her left leg, dropping her to the floor.

“Good,” Bucky said, and strafed the room back and forth at head level; then Steve was charging in shield-first, ramming through the guards and the running scientists. He skidded to a stop next to Kardan, threw her up into a fireman’s carry. “The laptop!” Natasha shouted, and he grabbed that too and bolted back. Natasha lobbed four smoke grenades and said, “This way!” and they all fell in after her, reconfiguring: Bucky and Sam bringing up the rear, and Steve in the middle.

Kardan was struggling a little on his shoulders, gasping. “Quit it,” Steve said shortly. “If you move my hands off your wounds, you’ll probably bleed out before we get out of here.”

“This is _folly_ ,” she said. “What do you hope to accomplish? What has been done cannot be undone. The inevitable — ”

Bucky reached forward and yanked her head back by the hair. “Shut up or I’ll cut out your tongue,” he said. She shut up.

They made it back up to the fourth floor. But by then Hydra had gotten over the first shock of the attack, not just reacting anymore but setting up a real defense. The four of them got pinned down in a hallway, Bucky returning machine-gun fire while they ducked behind a makeshift barricade of a door Steve had ripped out of its hinges to throw in front of them.

Natasha rigged up her last few taser disks with wire, making a net; she threw it out and took down the whole front row. Bucky followed it up, and they managed to get another hundred yards down, but the stairwell door was a hundred yards more, and even as they moved, another squad came pouring out of it, hunched down behind bulletproof kevlar shields and starting to set up some kind of heavy-duty weapon, power-nailing it to the floor.

Sam felt seconds ticking away in his head, took a quick glance at his watch: they had two minutes left. If Banner had to go, Hydra could lock down their escape route, and he’d have gotten them all killed: Steve, Natasha, Bucky; and maybe worse than killed.

_Not going to happen_ , he decided, flat out, and slid around the side of the barricade to get a better field of view. If he got shot, all right: better than a lot of the alternatives. He focused hard, trying to do whatever had happened up there in the room with Kardan again. In the middle of a firefight was a hell of a place to start trying to use a brand-new superpower, but it worked: abruptly he was seeing straight and clear to tiny details: patches of exposed skin, gaps between the shields. He started to take the soldiers out rapid-fire, one bullet apiece.

He blew through his last shots, shouted “I’m out!” Bucky tossed a clip into his hand that time; quick reload and he took another fourteen down, and then Steve stood up and threw the shield, hard and fast, ricocheting back and forth along the hallway and taking out the three operators on the big gun just as they got it aimed. “Go!” he shouted, and Bucky went over the barricade, caught the shield flying back to them, and charged down the hall behind it.

Sam rolled up to his feet and was after him, Natasha by his side and Steve coming up behind with Kardan slung over his shoulders again. Burn of a bullet searing across his cheekbone, another clipping his knee; he didn’t feel the pain yet, and they slammed into the breaking knot of Hydra troops and made it past them and into the stairwell.

“Forty-five seconds,” Natasha said, kicking the door shut behind Steve and slapping a small device across the door frame. They kept running up the stairs, and behind them a bunch of screams broke out, along with the crackle of electricity and the stink of burning flesh; Sam didn’t look back to see.

They’d made it out, though: Hydra had thrown everything they’d had at the fourth floor, and when they came out the stairwell they found out why. Banner was standing just outside, all alone, looking down at his watch. “Good timing,” he said.

“Save the congratulations until we’re out,” Steve said, and they ran all the way down the hall together, Banner panting in huge gulps by the time they hit the elevator, darting anxious looks at his watch. Natasha grabbed the remote from him, and they were flying up; they were out the doors and in the stacks again, moving up the stairwell and bursting out in front of a couple of startled late-night students coming out of a lab.

“Get out of the building!” Natasha snapped without slowing down, and then they were out in the cool, clear night air, nobody on their tail as far as Sam could tell with a look behind.

They all piled into Natasha’s SUV. Sam got the lever on one side of the back seat, Bucky got the other, and they lowered it flat. “Lay her down,” Sam said, already grabbing for the first aid kit even as Natasha peeled out. Steve put Kardan down on her back. Sam didn’t look at her face and made himself stick to routine, one step after another, nothing he hadn’t done a thousand times before: check the airway, check the breathing, pulse okay; he got foam packed in the two gunshot wounds and stopped the bleeding. They were neat and clean, exactly the right spot to disable but not kill, clear of the major vessels.

“Is she going to make it?” Steve said.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Yeah, she’s going to make it.”

Kardan was well enough to be watching him intently, her eyes darting briefly around the car and back, clinical and evaluating. Sam sat up and grabbed wipes and cleaned his bloodstained hands, doing his best to ignore her; his skin crawled under that look. Steve didn’t like it any better than he did, because he moved in between them. “We’re going to have some questions for you,” he said to her.

“I am not feeling very forthcoming,” she said.

On her other side, Bucky seized her wrist. She inhaled shortly as he leaned in over her, his eyes intent on her face. “Did you ever read my mission files?” he said. “You had clearance. Do you remember the one in Molodechno? What Hydra had me do to that MI6 agent?” She swallowed. “You’ll talk,” he said, low and contemptuous.

“How long to Stark Tower?” Steve asked Natasha.

“An hour,” she said.

Kardan sat herself up, carefully and slowly. “If I cooperate,” she said, and they looked at her, “will you — ” She abruptly doubled over with a gasp, clutching at her stomach. Steve looked at Sam, startled and worried, and in the opening she grabbed Bucky’s spare knife out of his boot top and lunged forward and stabbed it deep into Banner’s arm.

“Well, shit,” Bucky said, and then the car was exploding off the road, a howling worse than being hit and metal screaming all around them as the Hulk burst roaring out through the roof and the floor, putting his feet straight down onto the highway. The wheels came off the road and flipped them. Sam braced against the frame with two feet and his hand as they rolled, getting a hand on Steve’s belt and somehow managing to hang on. Bucky had grabbed onto Kardan.

The car shrieked across the asphalt on its side and slammed to a stop against the median. The Hulk was bellowing in rage, and Jesus, it was like the goddamn Tyrannosaurus from Jurassic Park, except it was _in the car_ with them, and it was more than just a monster; it was rage, a wall of fury. Sam heard Natasha panting on the other side of the driver’s seat, saw the flash of her knife slicing her seatbelt; she dived out the shattered windshield just as the Hulk swung a fist and tore the car apart around them.

He burst out onto the highway, cars and trucks blasting their horns, wailing by. The Hulk roared again and threw the car door still hanging off his arm across the five lanes of traffic on I-95, nearly taking out an SUV.

“Doctor Banner!” Steve was shouting, hauling himself up out of the wreckage. “Bruce!”

Kardan was still hanging dazed in Bucky’s arm. “Fucking stupid,” he snarled and heaved her up and out, onto the median, then leaned down to give Sam a hand climbing out.

She staggered up to her feet as they jumped down, wiping away the blood running down her forehead from a scrape. “Do you think so?” she said. She was looking at Sam. “You realize of course the projected death toll for a Hulk incident in a major metropolitan area exceeds a thousand. If you do not remove him from the vicinity — ”

Sam stared at her, horror rising in his throat. “Remove him with _what?_ ” he said, and grabbed her by the arms. “What the hell did you put _in_ me?”

She was staring up at him with bright, grotesquely excited eyes. “What Erskine could not have dreamed of doing,” she breathed. “The union of the most advanced technology and the untapped potential of the human body—”

“Save the fucking speech!” Sam shoved her away and turned as the ground shook underneath them. Natasha was throwing flares down in the road, stopping the traffic, waving people back in desperation, and Steve was in front of a tipped tour bus, under the shield, braced desperately: the Hulk was pounding down on him, snarling in rage, and Steve was deflecting blows into the highway, the Hulk’s fists leaving giant pocked craters scattered around him.

Sam looked at Bucky. “You have anything like a cable?” Bucky nodded and yanked out a compact coil of thin cabling. Sam ripped his shirt off over his head and let the wings out, an incongruously fantastic feeling like stretching after a long run, and he took one end of the coil and threw himself into the air. The wings caught, lifted him, and everything was coming together: the ground falling away into a wide crisp picture, human beings and cars and the bright green Hulk popping out like targets, the wings moving almost without thought, easy as taking a walk.

Bucky was running along the highway, carrying the coil, and Natasha was too: Sam could almost see their trajectories as if they were lines being drawn for him on a map. As the Hulk lifted both hands joined to slam another blow straight down on Steve, she leaped for his back, landing both clenched fists at the base of his skull and setting off a crackle of electricity. The Hulk yelled and started grabbing at the back of his neck, arms raised, and Bucky slung the coil down to Steve under one arm as Natasha went backflipping off out of the way.

The three of them slung it around and around to each other, dodging the Hulk’s flying fists, until they’d wrapped him a good dozen times, then Steve hurled the coil up to Sam on the other end. Sam caught it, secured the other loose end around the coil, slung the whole thing across his shoulders and threw himself up. It seemed impossible: he couldn’t, _shouldn’t_ be able to lift that weight; except the wings were beating in time with his heart, that weird pins-and-needles crackle going all over his back, funny ozone smell in the air. He was climbing, the Hulk’s mass pressing down on his shoulders, straining his neck, and the Hulk was coming up off the ground, howling in fury and thrashing around in the cables.

The pain in Sam’s skull was getting brighter and sharper. He kept going. Underneath him the Jersey suburbs were rolling out over the curve of the earth, amber streetlights, traffic signals and red brake lights; houses packed close together. The Hulk was grabbing the cables and trying to climb up them; Sam beat up higher and then did a fast drop, swinging in a circle, and shook him loose. “Want down!” Hulk roared furiously, kicking.

“Yeah, well, Hulk doesn’t _get_ down while Hulk’s having a tantrum,” Sam said, a vivid flash of little Jody yelling and crying and trying to bite while Sarah said in resignation, “He’s going through a phase,” as she lugged him out of the living room. His head hurt, bad, and he wondered if he’d know when it started, if he’d be able to tell he was losing — times, places, people. He couldn’t let that matter right now. “Soon as you calm down, I’ll let you down,” he added. “Otherwise we’re headed for the Atlantic and Hulk’s getting a cold bath.”

“Hulk calm!” Hulk screamed.

“I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to tell when you’re calm,” Sam said.

“Hulk not like cold water!”

“Hulk likes hurting people?” Sam said, tiredly.

Hulk fell quiet and stopped thrashing. They were out over a quiet neighborhood now, everything asleep at this hour. Not much noise around them but the wind and a few seagulls crying inland, a few airplanes in the distance headed for the city, and abruptly a spike went straight into his skull over his ear, blinding sharp.

The world swam underneath him, lights whirling; where was he? He couldn’t think. A strange sensation was creeping over him, a feeling like he’d left something behind somewhere and he had to get back to it. He had to get back to it _now_. _No_ , he thought dizzily. _No, I have to_ — he couldn’t remember.

There was a horrible weight dragging him down. Something told him he needed to put it down, but that was wrong; he _knew_ that was wrong. He looked down: the green monster hanging off his shoulders, sullenly kicking its huge feet, and houses everywhere beneath it: he caught glimpses in every direction of kids sleeping, people drowsing off in front of the tv. He couldn’t put it down here. Another spike blazed in, another white-out of pain, insisting. “Don’t put it down,” he said out loud through the pain, trying to remember. “Don’t put it down.” He flew on towards the ocean, towards the place he was supposed to go.  


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The room was silver and white, full of computers and medical equipment, and there were four other people in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With so many thanks to cesperanza and counteragent! <3

He was. The room was silver and white, full of computers and medical equipment, and there were four other people in it. He watched them blankly. None of them were talking to him. He was sitting on an exam table. One of the four was standing close by, held tensely. He evaluated the man: tall, strong, trained, not a threat at the moment. The man looked back at him with a strange, twisted expression. He looked away.

His head ached and his body felt sore, especially his chest and his left wing. His throat hurt. If there was a reason, he didn’t remember it. The injuries were minor and didn’t require action, so he didn’t move. Something electronic beeped. He looked across the room at the computer one of the men was working on. It had multiple screens: one of them filled with thumbnails of a fifty-page document, with one page full of an engineering schematic blown up. On the thumbnail of the first page, where the title was large enough to read despite the pixel blurring. _Candidate Evaluation: Samuel Thomas Wilson_. The words didn’t mean anything.

He was, and he kept being, and then from one moment to the next he became somebody.

The man at the computer was saying, “There we go. Very nice. You know, it’s possible I’m even more of a genius than I had previously realized.” By the time he finished talking, his voice was oddly familiar, and then the man next to the exam table was— _Steve_ , saying, “ _What?_ ” with his voice sharp. “Tony—”

“It’s _working_ ,” said Tony Stark, apparently. “As I thought. Our helpful little friends just needed a new set of marching orders: now they’re fixing everything they broke.”

“How exactly are they going to _fix_ this?” Steve said, his voice rising, literally turning from a stranger to somebody he loved, right in front of Sam’s eyes.

“Okay,” Sam said, staring at him, “this is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me, and lately that’s saying something,” and Steve whirled and grabbed at Sam’s arms so fast that he accidentally pulled Sam off the table.

“Sam,” he said, his voice cracking.

Banner popped up and reached between them to catch at the IV tubing and the wires taped to Sam’s chest. “Careful, there,” he said, looking over at a monitor screen. “Vitals all seem to be okay.”

“Of course they’re okay, why wouldn’t they be okay,” Stark said over his shoulder.

“It’s not like the nanites in his brain just got reprogrammed or anything,” Banner said.

“Excuse you, I know what I’m doing,” Stark said.

“Sam,” Steve said, ignoring their squabbling; he was searching Sam’s face desperately. “Are you—”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Far as I can tell, anyway.” He shut his eyes and spot-checked himself: seventh birthday party when he’d gotten the remote-control airplane; fifteen and making out with his buddy Wells up in his bedroom while they were blowing off their chemistry homework; the first time out with the wings, Riley whooping in his ear as they blazed a trail across a wide blue sky; getting to the hospital and having Sarah put Jody into his arms, a little blanket-wrapped wailing sausage. They were all there, and the bad ones, too: the crying in the house the whole day after the cops had come the night before, to say his dad was never coming home again; the pillar of billowing smoke trailing away through the desert night, gunfire blooms in red all around him.

Everything ended somewhere in midair, the Hulk below him. There wasn’t even a blank spot in his memory, no sense of being asleep; it was like time had just stopped, and restarted right here in this room. The first few minutes were already fading, the sensation of being _no one_ slipping out of his grasp. Sam shuddered. “What happened?” he said.

“The nanites—activated,” Steve said, strangled. “You were carrying the Hulk away, and then—”

“You took off for what turned out to be a Hydra submarine about twenty miles off the coast, presumably to report in,” Natasha said; Sam lifted his head up. She was standing near Stark by the computers, her arms folded over her chest, watching him. She met his eyes and nodded a little, and he knew with a swell of relief that she’d been ready to keep that promise, if she’d had to.

“Except you didn’t put me down first, so that seems to have worked out okay,” Banner said, wryly.

“If Hydra won’t come to the mountain, drop the mountain on Hydra,” Stark said. “We picked you both up out of the floating debris about six hours ago, once the Hulk chilled out. Got you back here—the mad scientist was persuaded to cooperate, Jarvis had a little chat with your onboard mechanics, et voila.” He turned and waved a grandiose hand up and down Sam’s body. “How do you feel?”

“Like my brain just got busted up and repaired by a bunch of tiny gremlins, and maybe they might do it again sometime,” Sam said. “Dude, if _you_ could reprogram these things—”

Stark pointed at him. “Excellent point, already on it,” he said, singsong.

“Can you get them out of me?” Sam said.

“No,” Stark said. “Or rather, sure, but first of all, the process would almost certainly kill you, and if it didn’t, you wouldn’t even be able to stand up. There’s nothing wrong with the nanites, the nanites are awesome. In fact, they’re the whole point. The wings aren’t actually wings—”

“Uh,” Sam said.

Stark made an impatient gesture. “Yes, yes, they’re wings, but their _primary_ function is power supply. Hydra made wings because they needed the surface area to get enough juice to run the nanites. Have to hand it to your mad scientist, they’re really a brilliant design—too bad she’s completely insane and evil. They’re what’s making you strong enough to lug around three hundred pounds of wings on your back without even noticing.”

“Three _hundred_ ,” Sam said, staring, because what the hell; they didn’t feel like anything.

“Yes,” Tony said. “Which is why if we did manage to wipe out the nanites, you’d end up stuck on your back like a turtle, unable to move. Anyway, I’ve ripped out all the functions designed to cause any kind of damage to your brain: Hydra would have to get in there and completely rewrite the code from scratch, and we’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen. Although there is one catch, the same problem Hydra had in the first place: if I completely eliminate external access to the nanites, there won’t be any way to modify them going forward.”

He looked at Sam expectantly, like he thought that was a real downside: this was clearly a guy who felt differently about the idea of tiny programmable robots living in his brain. “I’m going to have to make do with the current operating system,” Sam said. “Lock them down, man.”

That took Stark a couple of hours, during which Sam stayed right in the lab, watching; he couldn’t follow the coding, but he felt pretty invested in making sure nobody snuck in and added a few extra lines while Stark’s back was turned or anything. Natasha hopped up onto the lab table with him and murmured, “We’re on the top level and the five floors beneath have been emptied out and secured. The elevators are locked out and Barnes has the hallway outside. Nobody’s here but us.”

“Thanks,” Sam said, quietly. Steve was pacing back and forth across the room in front of the door, like a tiger on guard duty.

“Okay, you’re all set,” Stark finally announced. “Although I do note that according to the final diagnostics I ran on your passengers, integration is still only at about 97%, so you might get one or two more minor surprises over the next few months or so as the final systems come online.”

“No, do _not_ tell me that,” Sam said, resisting the temptation to go over there and shake Stark: he hadn’t needed that tossed at him like a landmine. Steve had wheeled around and taken a couple of steps towards Tony like he was feeling that exact same temptation. “I am _done_ with surprises. What kind of surprises are we talking here?”

“No idea,” Stark said, shrugging easily; he hadn’t even turned around. “Hydra seems to have been working on a theme, though. A compulsion to eat seeds? The power to talk to pigeons? Whoa,” Steve had lost his own fight and had grabbed Tony by the shoulder and hauled him around. Stark just patted him indulgently on the cheek. “Don’t freak out on me, Rogers, your boyfriend’s going to be fine. We’re talking tertiary systems at most. No brain damage, I promise. Just don’t go flying too close to the sun,” he added to Sam.

Stark ushered them out of the lab, waved his arm to the building. “Help yourselves. TV and full bar down the hall, don’t let Dummy mix your drinks, and there’s probably some food somewhere around there. Okay, Cold War,” he pointed straight at Bucky, who’d been parked at the far end of the hall with a sniper rifle and a glare, to which Stark seemed a hundred percent impervious. “Your turn. Let’s see that arm. I’m on a roll here, free oil changes for everybody.”

Bucky looked at Steve. Steve eyed Tony irresolutely. Stark just made an impatient get-on-with-it move. “Come on, you’ve got at least two joints locked up, I can hear the grinding from here.”

Steve sighed and gave Bucky a nod. Bucky got up and sidled warily into the lab, never taking his eyes off Stark. Steve hesitated, looking back at Sam.

“You can’t leave a man behind in there,” Sam said. “It’s okay; I’m not going anywhere, except to find that bar he was talking about.”

“I’ll stay with him,” Natasha said.

“Right,” Steve said, and went back inside.

“Come on,” Natasha said, and led him down the hall to a gigantic sunken living room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on a terrace about sixty stories straight up over Manhattan.

Stark’s bar contained a bottle of fifty-year old Scotch which had probably cost about as much as Sam’s last car. Sam felt zero compunctions about pouring himself two extremely healthy doses, the first of which he drank standing right there at the bar in between bites of the hero sandwich the robot arm on the end had painstakingly been putting together, presumably for Stark’s lunch. It whined when he stole the plate out from under it. “Don’t even start with me,” Sam told it. It resentfully started putting together a new one from scratch.

He took his second glass out onto the terrace, wind whipping past at 65 stories up. Natasha sat down on the edge next to him, kicking her heels over the side. The sun just coming up felt great on his bare arms and chest, and looking out across the city was like—opening his eyes for the first time all over again; details leaping out, touches of beauty. The rivers glittering on either side and the smooth silver eyes of the eagles on the Chrysler Building staring back at him, the cars that he could pick out one by one already starting to crowd the FDR. There was one lone red-tailed hawk drifting uptown towards the park, turning a bright black eye to look back at him. Sam spread his own wings out behind him, just like stretching his arms out, and picked up the air currents; he knew without consciously thinking about it the path he’d take if he jumped right now: how he’d catch that updraft he could almost _see_ coming up the side.

“Nice view,” he said. “This how the one-percent live? I won’t say it’s not nice.”

“There are 1500 billionaires in the world,” Natasha said, leaning back on her palms. “There are eleven of us. Counting you.” She was looking at him steadily when he glanced back.

“Excuse me, is that a question?” Sam said. “What else do you think I’m going to do with myself? Messenger service? Window washing, maybe? I bet I could really—”

She was sitting up outraged. “Don’t you even—”

“—clean up,” Sam finished, grinning at her, and ducked the smack she aimed at his head. “How does this even work? No offense, but I don’t think I’m going to be picking up the phone the next time SHIELD calls.”

“No,” she agreed. “I don’t think there’s an answer to your question yet. But we’ll need one soon.”

Steve came out of the building behind them and sat down heavily on Natasha’s other side, carrying a glass bottle of Coke and the second sandwich: poor little robot arm.

“Hey,” Sam said. “How’s he doing?”

“All right, I guess,” Steve said. He popped the cap off with his bare hand and tipped half the bottle down his throat in a huge gulp, then tore into the sandwich with the fervor that meant he hadn’t fed the inner supersoldier enough lately. He didn’t stop eating long enough to talk again until he’d swallowed the last bite and polished off the bottle. Sam sipped his own Scotch and let the wings soak up sunshine.

Finally Steve licked the crumbs off his fingers. “Tony did something to the arm, and Bucky just fell asleep right there on the bench. I thought something was wrong, but turns out they—” He stopped and swallowed hard, his face tight with anger. “They made it _hurt_. On purpose.”

Natasha nodded. “So they could use pain relief as another axis of control. It’s a standard technique. When you come in after a mission, you get a hit of relief. Stay out too long, it gets worse. And he’s been out for a while now.”

Steve braced his hands on the edge, clenched tight, shoulders bowed and taut with anger. Sam shook his head. “Well, we knew we were dealing with some straight-up evil people here.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Anyway. I carried him to a bedroom and Jarvis is keeping an eye on him. But he’s still so—I just—I wish I knew what to do for him.”

Natasha shrugged. “There are limits to what you can do for anyone.”

“I don’t know,” Sam said slowly, “I think he kinda told us.” Steve looked up at him. “Steve, we’ve been running after him trying to help for half a year now, and we didn’t find hide nor hair. He only came out when _you_ needed _him_. Seems to me like the one thing he really remembers, the one thing he’s holding on to, is watching your back. It’s not a surprise if that’s what he wants to do.”

Steve looked down at his hands, frowning. “He’s been through hell. He deserves to just—stop.”

Natasha just snorted. Sam said, “ _You_ planning to stop anytime soon? Let Hydra off the hook for all this?” Steve was silent, which was answer enough. “Yeah. I don’t think you’re going to sell him on that one. Or any of us, for that matter.”

Steve sighed. “I guess.”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t take a vacation first, though,” Sam added. “Stark’s got to own an island with a beach on it somewhere, right?”

“Probably,” Steve said. “He’s got a gold-plated faucet in the bathroom.”

They both cracked up, and then their eyes met, across Natasha, and they both stopped laughing. She didn’t even look at either of them, as far as Sam could tell, but her mouth curved a little with private amusement, and without any hurry she scooted herself back from the edge in one smooth move and stood up from between them. “I’m clocking out,” she said. “It’s been a long week.” Sam reached up a hand, _thank you_ , and she caught it with a strong backwards shake, _you’re welcome_. “Count me in for the deserted island,” she tossed over her shoulder, heading inside. “I look great in a bikini.”

“Oh, really,” Steve called after her, dry, and she threw back a sly grin as the mirrored glass doors hissed open for her. Sam snorted.

Then the doors closed up behind her, and Steve was looking at him again, reaching for him, and they were in each other’s arms and kissing. “Sam,” Steve said, kissing his throat, his shoulders, his mouth. “Sam,” and then he pushed Sam back a little and said, desperately, “Sam—I don’t really know if I’m coming or going, right now. Everything with Bucky. If—if you don’t want—”

“Get back over here and I’ll show you what I want,” Sam said, and they were kissing even more ferociously, Sam getting at Steve’s shirt, pulling his belt loose and tossing it aside, sliding a hand down into his pants. Steve moaned and leaned in closer, and then he tried to pull back again, saying, “Wait, maybe—”

“Are you kidding me?” Sam said. “Steve Rogers, do you want to get laid right now or not?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Steve said. “But we’re—”

Sam hauled him back in again, and Steve overbalanced onto him, and they fell off the building.

“—really close to the edge!” Steve yelled wildly, clinging on as they tumbled over and over, and then Sam did catch that beautiful warm updraft going by and beat up into it. Two hundred forty pounds of supersoldier were dragging at him, but it didn’t fucking matter, he was _flying_ , climbing into the air with Steve whooping and laughing in his ear, hanging onto him, and Sam got an arm around him and started working on his pants, and Steve yelped, blushing, and yelled over the rushing wind, “ _Here?_ ”

“Hell yeah!” Sam shouted back. “Mile-high club like nobody’s ever done it before, baby,” laughing, and Steve was crimson and shoving his face against Sam’s neck and rock-hard under Sam’s hand. He was fumbling at Sam’s pants blindly at the same time, his big warm hand pushing into Sam’s briefs, so fantastic around his cock, thumb slipping over the head. Sam groaned and threw them into another spiraling loop, breaking through the cool mist of a cloud and up over the cover, city glittering below through gauzy cover and the sun blazing on his back, the wings spreading even wider to glide them overhead.

“You want to try it again?” Sam murmured right in Steve’s ear.

“Yeah?” Steve said, and he carefully slid his hand onto Sam’s wing where it met his back. Sensation went running bright all through the wings as they woke up, and _fuck_ the touch felt good, shudders of pleasure spreading out like ripples from where Steve’s hand started them going. All the feathers ruffled a little, and Sam groaned deep and hard as Steve stirred them up some more, stroking his palm gently over them, putting his second hand into them. He wrapped tight around Sam with arms and legs, both his hands sunk deep into the wings, holding on.

He thrust his hips up, too, clumsy but hitting all the right places, and Sam was fucking _desperate_ for it all of a sudden; he grabbed Steve’s pants and jerked them down his thighs, getting his ass bare. Steve let his head fall back, laughing and incredulous. “I don’t believe we’re doing this,” he shouted, but he was shoving Sam’s pants down, too. “ _How_ do we even do this?”

“Oh, we are going to _manage_ ,” Sam said, sweeping back more horizontal and getting Steve settled almost on top of him. It wasn’t all that easy. Steve had dissolved into straight-up giggling, his face tipped against Sam’s head. “You’re not helping here, Rogers!” Sam yelled, fighting a gust of wind that tried to push him into a sideways roll. Steve only shook his head, incoherent, still laughing.

Despite the total lack of an assist and the gusts that caught at them and tried to pull them apart, Sam managed to get aimed more or less in the right direction and gave a good firm nudge, and Steve gasped out and abruptly got with the program. “Oh, jeez, we’re really,” he said, and then he got a hand down and helped, pushing; Sam sucked his fingers wet and got them down there, too.

It still wasn’t anything like slick, so Sam took some serious time, letting gravity do most of the work: spiraling glide down, then a few strokes up, working in a little further each time. Steve still wasn’t making it any easier, because he’d started making these noises, little _nngh_ sounds from the back of his wide-open pink mouth. He kept trying to squirm around and hurry everything up, and he felt so damn good Sam was having to fight himself not to push it.

“Shh, we’re going to get there,” Sam panted, but Steve just said, “ _When?_ ” flat-out whining.

“Man, you are demanding,” Sam said. “Next time I’ll bring lube.”

“ _Next time_ ,” Steve groaned and moved his hips again.

They did get there, everything easing up little by little, until finally Sam was all the way in and moving, pushing up into Steve with short little thrusts that made him let out more of those sweet gasping noises, taking it. A slow red flush was climbing up Steve’s neck and face, his eyes going vague and unfocused. “Sam,” he said. “ _Sam,_ ” panting out against him, his breaths skating over the sweat broken out over Sam’s shoulders.

“Yeah, baby,” Sam said, nuzzling the sweat-sticky hair off Steve’s forehead, kissing his mouth. He didn’t even have to think about the wings anymore, about flying; it was turning into just this thing he was doing without having to work at it, like walking down the street. “Hold on tight for me,” he said, and then he plunged into a swooping curve, down and whipping back up again. “Oh, _Christ!_ ” Steve yelled out loud, as the acceleration of the climb pushed him down deep and hard. His pants, which had been dangling inside-out off one ankle, gave up the ghost and took off across the sky like some giant khaki butterfly.

Sam laughed, feeling like there was a sun inside his chest, and he took another huge rollercoaster swoop through a cloud the size of a subway car, arms wrapped around Steve’s body, kissing him all over as he burst on through, trails of fog clinging to them. Steve hung on laughing and gasping. Again and again, while they yelled together, until Sam felt crazy and high on sex and adrenaline and speed, and Steve choked out strangled, “Sam, I think I’m going to—oh _God_ , I need—”

“Hang on to that thought,” Sam said, and banked a sharp turn to the Tower, flying a little too fast, and they hit the deck together and tumbled apart.

Steve rolled back up to his feet in one movement and staggered back over to him, ridiculous with his ass bare under his t-shirt and beautiful anyway, and Sam couldn’t quit laughing long enough to get to his feet again. Steve grabbed him by the arm and dragged him up and back inside, threw himself backwards onto the couch and hauled Sam down on top of him. “Now, _now_ , oh _God_ ,” he said through his teeth, and Sam fucked back into him with a few short fast thrusts, and they were moving again, moving together, and fuck, Sam was _there_ ; he was there, and he just managed to hang on long enough to see Steve come apart under him, crying out and shaking, before he went over.

“Oh,” Steve sighed out, “Oh, oh, oh,” each huff coming out softer and more relaxed, his whole body sinking back limp. “Wow,” he said, with one more hiccup of laughter, and wrapped his arms around Sam’s body.

“Oh, _yeah_ ,” Sam agreed, propping up on one arm over him. Steve was just grinning up at him, half-guilty and happy, a little dazed. His hair was a rat’s-nest, fluffed all the way up and gone every which way, and Sam put his hand in it and ruffled it just for fun, while Steve kept beaming up at him.

“Well,” Tony said, and they both yelped and rolled off the couch onto the floor and stuck their heads up over it, appalled, to see him perched at the bar with Bruce, who was wearing a faintly bemused expression; Tony was just sipping a drink like guys made it on his couch in front of him all the time. The robot arm seemed to be looking at them, too, in a judgy kind of way. “I’m fairly certain that wasn’t on the list of recommended activities, although I grant you that some temptations are hard to resist. Do you want a bedroom? I think there are at least twenty-three of them.”

“Um. Yes, thanks,” Steve said faintly, his forehead pressed against the side of the couch, blushing across his whole back. He reached an arm over and stole a throw from the couch.

“That just went straight to either the top or the bottom of my list of walks of shame,” Sam said, when they’d escaped out the side door. “Not sure which.”

“Either way, _hurry_ ,” Steve said, looking around behind him, hunted. Stark had wolf-whistled him on the way out.

They dived into the first bedroom they found: sunlight pouring in over a king-size bed, pristine creamy sheets. Steve looked at it, looked at Sam. Sam thought about it, then shrugged. “I’m in.” He felt amazing, actually, not even tired a little. The wings had folded up on his back, feeling warm and almost—purring, somehow, like a well-oiled car.

“Let’s see if we can find some supplies for this one,” he added, which turned out not to be a problem: Stark’s end tables were stocked just as well as his bar. Steve had managed to spread himself out on offer by the time Sam finished making the first-round picks. “You sure you’re not sore?” Sam said.

“No,” Steve said, making wistful eyes at him through his lashes, and Sam snorted. “I don’t need a lot of convincing here, in case you hadn’t noticed,” and damn, Steve gave it up even more beautifully when Sam had some better materials to work with.

Afterwards he sprawled out over Steve’s chest, head pillowed down on one substantial pectoral, wing unfolded over them to block the glare: the sun was still coming in. Steve was trailing his fingers up and down against the edge feathers near his hand, his eyes half closed. Sam shut his eyes, and then he opened them again: he had a weird feeling of air stirring against his skin. He lifted his head.

Steve was fast asleep, curled on his side facing him. It had been a few hours: the sun had headed for the other side of the city and the room was dim. Bucky was standing at the foot of the bed staring down at them. He’d taken a shower and gotten a set of Stark Research sweats from somewhere, which made it more rather than less weird: he looked too close to ordinary. His hair was clean.

“Hey,” Sam said quietly, not to wake Steve. Bucky looked at him. Sam studied his face, trying to read it, got nothing; he shrugged inwardly and just asked straight out, “This cool with you?”

Bucky was silent a moment, then he said, “You love him.”

“Love the hell out of him,” Sam said. Bucky nodded, and then frowned a little, small sideways grimace of his mouth like he was stuck trying to figure something out. Sam took a guess. “Doesn’t mean he couldn’t use somebody else watching his back. I don’t know how much you remember, but the man can get himself into trouble all over the place.”

Bucky relaxed minutely, and nodded again. Then he went around to Steve’s side of the bed and climbed in. He lay down back to back with Steve, exhaled deeply once, and was out just like that.

Sam hadn’t had time to do anything other than blink. He stared down at the two of them. He hadn’t actually figured on _that_ much sharing, but he couldn’t help noticing Steve had relaxed deeper into sleep, a few of the faint worried furrows in his forehead smoothing out. Sam sighed. “Things you’ve gotten me into, Rogers,” he muttered under his breath, and threw Steve a half-hearted glare. But Steve was settling deeper into sleep, smiling and golden, and hell, Sam couldn’t help bending down to kiss him. Steve kissed him back in warm sweet sleepy answer, and slid a hand up and down along his side, inviting him back down.

Sam shook his head, smiling too, and settled in again. All right, it was crazy; it was all crazy: from the wings to the tower to the rapidly multiplying superheroes in his bed, which apparently included him. But all the same, he couldn’t complain. He was right where he wanted to be.

# End 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's done! \o/ Thanks so much for hanging on for the ride. All fb loved, here or [on tumblr](http://astolat.tumblr.com/post/93229673033/wings-is-now-complete-o-wings-21744-words).

**Author's Note:**

> All feedback loved, here or [on my tumblr](http://astolat.tumblr.com/post/93229673033/wings-is-now-complete-o-wings-21744-words)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Archangel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3288020) by [Ihateallergies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ihateallergies/pseuds/Ihateallergies)




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